Re: VLANs won't persist

[albcares]

could I suggest *wicd*, instead? I mean, You could download-and-install it
through the time of running connection, and manage your needs with it. I
must warn that could be a conflict with NetworkManager, so you have to
chose.
yours sincerely
ac

2015-04-12 23:10 GMT+02:00 Lisi Reisz :

> On Saturday 11 April 2015 04:50:12 M7 wrote:
> > i can manually bring it up using vconfig add eth0 4 and have access. Upon
> > reboot, ifconfig only shows me lo interface.
> >
> > Any help would be appreciated!
>
> Have you got NetworkManager running?
>
> Lisi
>
>
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Re: Debian 7 and external monitors and graphics adaptors

[Curt]

On 2015-04-09, Bret Busby  wrote:
> Hello.
>
> On a new installation of Debian 7 on an Acer "laptop" computer with an
> AMD Radeon R2 graphics adaptor, the external monitor does not work.
>
> The external monitor works with MS Win 7, with MS Win 8, with Debian
> 6, and with Ununtu 12.04 and with Ubuntu 14.04.

Driver? (Ubuntu/Debian--compare).


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Re: Debian 7 and external monitors and graphics adaptors

[Bret Busby]

On 13/04/2015, Curt  wrote:
> On 2015-04-09, Bret Busby  wrote:
>> Hello.
>>
>> On a new installation of Debian 7 on an Acer "laptop" computer with an
>> AMD Radeon R2 graphics adaptor, the external monitor does not work.
>>
>> The external monitor works with MS Win 7, with MS Win 8, with Debian
>> 6, and with Ununtu 12.04 and with Ubuntu 14.04.
>
> Driver? (Ubuntu/Debian--compare).
>
>

I have given the information of the graphics driver in Debian 7, for
the Acer laptop with the AMD Radeon R2 graphics adaptor.

Unfortunately, shortly after my last previous email message was posted
about the issues relating to Debian 7, the laptop computer suffered a
hardware failure, and I now have to make a warranty claim and take it
to be repaired (a bit like the other Acer computer, and, both were
running Debian 7, as the last operating system, before the hardware
crashes.

So, I can not find the driver  for Ubuntu, for the system with the
Radeon R2 graphics adaptor, unless and until that computer is repaired
and operational again.

In this latest instance, I happened to see text on the screen, at the
time of the hardware crash - I saw two lines of text at the top of the
then black screen; the upper line included "pnp bus"; that was all
that I could read, before the screen went blank, and the system is,
for the present, dead.

I tried to rtemove the battery, to try to replicate the repair that
the hardware people did on the V3-772G system, when that had its
hardware crash, but, I am unable to remove the battery.

So, I will now have to take the computer to the hardware people, and
find whether they can repair it.


When I took the Acer V3-772G to the hardware place, it was a two week
wait, before they could examine it, and, in that case, they repaired
it, on the day that they examined it, so, I expect that I could be
similarly waiting at least another two weeks, before this one can be
examined, after I have booked it in for repair.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992




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Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[August Karlstrom]

On 2015-04-13 07:20, bri...@aracnet.com wrote:

On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 18:55:54 -0700 Patrick Bartek
 wrote:


On Sun, 12 Apr 2015, Rodolfo Medina wrote:




Of course, if you really want TOTAL control of your GUI, a window
manager is the way to go.  That's what I did.  Installed Openbox.
The same WM that LXDE uses.  A little more work, but worth it.




i'll second the use of openbox.  i use it with fbpanel.

i too believe that gnome just pulls in way too much "stuff".

the most inconvenient thing about not using gnome is not having a way
to handle USS mass storage devices.


Assuming you mean USB mass storage devices it can be solved by starting 
the window manager in a ConsoleKit session. I run Blackbox and my 
~/.xinitrc ends with


exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch blackbox

In the file manager PCManFM mounting and unmounting USB devices works 
just fine. I run Debian Wheezy.



-- August


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Re: VLANs won't persist

[Lisi Reisz]

On Monday 13 April 2015 08:13:43 albcares wrote:
> could I suggest *wicd*, instead? I mean, You could download-and-install it
> through the time of running connection, and manage your needs with it. I
> must warn that could be a conflict with NetworkManager, so you have to
> chose.

I was asking about networkmangler because it occurred to me that the problem 
the OP has is typical of a networkmangler problem - but it can't be that if 
he hasn't got network mangler installed.  Hence asking if it is running.

wicd is indeed much better and:
# aptitude purge networkmanager && aptitude install wicd
is a command well established in my arsenal.

Lisi

> yours sincerely
> ac
>
> 2015-04-12 23:10 GMT+02:00 Lisi Reisz :
> > On Saturday 11 April 2015 04:50:12 M7 wrote:
> > > i can manually bring it up using vconfig add eth0 4 and have access.
> > > Upon reboot, ifconfig only shows me lo interface.
> > >
> > > Any help would be appreciated!
> >
> > Have you got NetworkManager running?
> >
> > Lisi
> >
> >
> > --
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Re: VLANs won't persist

[Reco]

 Hi.

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 09:13:43AM +0200, albcares wrote:
> could I suggest wicd, instead? I mean, You could download-and-install it 
> through the time of running connection, and manage your needs with it. I must 
> warn
> that could be a conflict with NetworkManager, so you have to chose. 
> yours sincerely
> ac

1) Wheezy's wicd is unable to manage VLANs.

2) OP needs to manage VLANs via conventional /etc/network/interfaces.

3) The whole problem lies in erroneous line in /etc/network/interfaces,
as was helpfully pointed by others two days ago.


In the light of this - how exactly does your proposition of installing
wicd would solve OP's problem?

Reco


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Re: Book questions

[Nate Bargmann]

* On 2015 13 Apr 01:58 -0500, Petter Adsen wrote:
> Thanks for your advice, I think I should focus mainly on C for the time
> being, and try to improve on my shell scripting rather than worry about
> Python just yet.

Then you have to wrestle with the question of POSIX shell versus Bash
extensions.  ;-) Both are in use but you'll find that in Debian many
Bashisms have been removed from system scripts in recent years.  Debian
now uses dash for the system shell which would probably be a good
candidate to test system scripts against.  User shells still default to
Bash although Zsh and others are available.

- Nate

-- 

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."

Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more: http://www.n0nb.us


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Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[Floris]

Op Sun, 12 Apr 2015 21:14:47 +0200 schreef David Wright  
:



[I'm hoping this isn't a duplicate post, but my first
attempt was rejected by bendel.debian.org as forged.]

Quoting Rodolfo Medina (rodolfo.med...@gmail.com):
According to documentations, gnome-core package is considered to be the  
very
minimal gnome installation in Debian.  But in my personal experience it  
is not

so.


Which documentation? Without seeing it, we can't tell whether the doc
is well-worded or not.



I think Rodolfo had read:
https://wiki.debian.org/Gnome


GNOME (core only)   
gnome-core package  
This is a minimalist GNOME installation
(You have to install all end-user applications later). Above packages  
depend on this one.


and I agree that the sentence "You have to install all end-user  
applications later" is incorrect.
Even Iceweasel is a dependency of gnome-core. I didn't know that Mozilla  
is a part of gnome.


Floris


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Re: debian 8

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2015, at 23:52, Bret Busby wrote:
> What they told me, is that the problem was solved by removing the
> battery, for about 15 minutes, then reinstalling the battery, and that
> the cause is that sometimes, operating systems do not shutdown
> properly.

Looks like the usual firmware quality issues, here.  The problem is really 
caused by halfbaked BIOS/UEFI/EC firmware, but the motherboard vendor will NOT 
fix that and will blame the operating system instead.  Unless it is a server, 
then they fix it really fast.

The workaround for this class of problems is to "brain-dead" the box: for 
deskptop and servers, unplugging from main power for a few minutes should do 
it, but for laptops you must remove the batteries and press the power button 
several times (for long periods)... it is even a long-time documented procedure 
on IBM and Lenovo Thinkpads.

For the record, the procedure for (modern) thinkpads is: remove battery packs 
and AC power, press power button for 4-5s at least 10 times, then follow with a 
long press (longer than 13s) at least once.

Sometimes it will also be necessary to remove the backup (RTC/CMOS) battery.  
In that case you will likely have to leave the box unpowered (do not reconnect 
any of the batteries or power) for several hours (try at least 12 hours) AFTER 
you did the power-button dance above, to actually reset everything.

> According to them, the whole of the problem, was the failure of the
> last used operating system, to properly shutdown.

Depends how you look at it, I guess. In my book, when firmware _and_ hardware 
fail to ensure a box power downs properly in the power-down path, and that it 
resets everything properly from any invalid states in the power-up path, it is 
a firmware and/or hardware defect (often a design shortcoming in the hardware 
case), not an operating system defect.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique de Moraes Holschuh 


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Re: Book questions

[Rusi Mody]

On Monday, April 13, 2015 at 12:30:03 PM UTC+5:30, Petter Adsen wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 09:35:25 -0700
> David Christensen wrote:
> 
> > On 04/12/2015 01:33 AM, Petter Adsen wrote:> OK, thank you, I will 
> > definitely consider Perl also, as I already know
> >  > a little and have a few books on it.
> > 
> > I'd advise learning one language well, where "well" includes security 
> > best practices.  Understand that learning any modern language takes a 
> > lot of time and effort.  So pick one that is good at solving the
> > kinds of problems that you are motivated to work on, because the
> > going will get tough and you'll have to find the tenacity to struggle
> > through.
> 
> I can see the logic in that. The issue with that is that I need them
> for two separate things - I want to learn C to get a deeper
> understanding of how Linux works, and I was initially thinking about
> Python for sysadmin tasks that I can't or don't know how to do in shell
> scripts.

One way to fry a brain is to learn C.
Another way to fry the brain is to struggle with regular expressions.
Unless you like a double-fried brain I suggest doing strictly one at a time.

20+ years ago I wrote a rant on why teaching (and ∴ learning) C causes grief:
http://blog.languager.org/2013/02/c-in-education-and-software-engineering.html

In one way it shows a lot of traps and pitfalls of beginners.
It also recommends better paradigms than C for learning programming.

If python had existed then I would have recommended it.


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reading an empty directory after reboot is very slow

[Vincent Lefevre]

I have some regular directory ~/eftests/tmp, and after a reboot,
I often check that it is empty (as I remove its contents before
the reboot): from the ~/eftests directory, I do

  ypig:~/eftests> ll tmp

which corresponds to

  ls -bF --color -l tmp

after alias expansion.

The problem is that this operation is (always?) very slow: something
like 100 seconds (1 minute and 40 seconds). It has been reproducible
for several months. The logs show nothing during this operation.

Any idea?

I'm thinking of a possible hardware problem (the machine and the disk
are 5 years old), but I would have expected some message in the logs
in such a case. Is there any way to check?

-- 
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100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: 
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)


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Re: apt stuck at "Reading database"

[Jape Person]

On 04/12/2015 10:46 PM, Chris Bannister wrote:

On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 11:50:40AM -0500, David Wright wrote:

In that situation, my first course of action would be to hide anything
but the essential sources.list contents of, basically, something like

# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 7.1.0 _Wheezy_ - Official i386 NETINST Binary-1 
20130615-21:53]/ wheezy main

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main non-free contrib

deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib non-free


I'd even argue that the deb-src entries are not necessary for the majority of
Debian users.



IIRC apt-listbugs or apt-listchanges (or both) don't work without the 
deb-src entries in /etc/apt/sources.list. I think these are tools that 
Debian users should be encouraged to use. At the least they provide a 
bit of a heads-up to the unwary during installations and upgrades.


But I do get your point.


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Re: reading an empty directory after reboot is very slow

[Loïc Grenié]

2015-04-13 14:39 GMT+02:00 Vincent Lefevre :
> I have some regular directory ~/eftests/tmp, and after a reboot,
> I often check that it is empty (as I remove its contents before
> the reboot): from the ~/eftests directory, I do
>
>   ypig:~/eftests> ll tmp
>
> which corresponds to
>
>   ls -bF --color -l tmp
>
> after alias expansion.
>
> The problem is that this operation is (always?) very slow: something
> like 100 seconds (1 minute and 40 seconds). It has been reproducible
> for several months. The logs show nothing during this operation.
>
> Any idea?

Maybe the directory is very large (even though its empty). Try

ls -ld tmp.

 and see if the file "tmp" is large. In that case,

cp -a tmp tmp2 && rm -rf tmp && mv tmp2 tmp

   should cure the problem (in 3min20).

> I'm thinking of a possible hardware problem (the machine and the disk
> are 5 years old), but I would have expected some message in the logs
> in such a case. Is there any way to check?

 Possbile but unlikely.

 Hope this helps,

   Loïc


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Re: reading an empty directory after reboot is very slow

[Darac Marjal]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 02:39:40PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> I have some regular directory ~/eftests/tmp, and after a reboot,
> I often check that it is empty (as I remove its contents before
> the reboot): from the ~/eftests directory, I do
> 
>   ypig:~/eftests> ll tmp
> 
> which corresponds to
> 
>   ls -bF --color -l tmp
> 
> after alias expansion.
> 
> The problem is that this operation is (always?) very slow: something
> like 100 seconds (1 minute and 40 seconds). It has been reproducible
> for several months. The logs show nothing during this operation.
> 
> Any idea?
> 
> I'm thinking of a possible hardware problem (the machine and the disk
> are 5 years old), but I would have expected some message in the logs
> in such a case. Is there any way to check?

I would probably start with running "strace ll tmp" and seeing what
happens. Does ls hangup on reading its own files, for example (by the
time you get to login, everything that ls depends on SHOULD already be
in the buffers, but you never know), or is it waiting while reading the
directory, or perhaps even waiting while outputting the result?

Some other things to investigate: Is tmp a regular directory? Does 'll
~/eftests' exhibit the same delay? What about some other method of
listing the directory contents such as 'for i in tmp/*; do echo $i;
done'?

> 
> -- 
> Vincent Lefèvre  - Web: 
> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: 
> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
> 
> 
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Description: Digital signature

Re: reading an empty directory after reboot is very slow

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2015-04-13 14:45:25 +0200, Loïc Grenié wrote:
> 2015-04-13 14:39 GMT+02:00 Vincent Lefevre :
> > The problem is that this operation is (always?) very slow: something
> > like 100 seconds (1 minute and 40 seconds). It has been reproducible
> > for several months. The logs show nothing during this operation.
> >
> > Any idea?
> 
> Maybe the directory is very large (even though its empty). Try
> 
> ls -ld tmp.
> 
>  and see if the file "tmp" is large.

Thanks! I didn't know that (I thought that the file system would
automatically "optimize" directories when files are removed, so
I've never looked closely at their size). Indeed:

ypig:~/eftests> ls -ld tmp
drwxr-xr-x 2 vlefevre vlefevre 29655040 2015-04-13 15:25:55 tmp/

-- 
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Excluding a directory from tar

[Petter Adsen]

I've been trying to make a tarball of my home directory, but I want to
exclude ~/.cache. First I tried '--exclude="~/.cache", but it didn't
work. Neither did '--exclude="~/.cache/*".

I got it working by creating an empty file in ~/.cache and using the
filename as an argument to "--exclude-tag-under", but what was I doing
wrong when trying to use "--exclude"?

Petter, curious

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"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."


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Re: Excluding a directory from tar

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2015-04-13 16:15:42 +0200, Petter Adsen wrote:
> I've been trying to make a tarball of my home directory, but I want to
> exclude ~/.cache. First I tried '--exclude="~/.cache", but it didn't
> work. Neither did '--exclude="~/.cache/*".

The ~ is not expended here:

$ echo "~/foo"
~/foo

Try --exclude="$HOME/.cache" or similar.

-- 
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100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: 
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)


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Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[Patrick Bartek]

On Sun, 12 Apr 2015, bri...@aracnet.com wrote:

> On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 18:55:54 -0700
> Patrick Bartek  wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 12 Apr 2015, Rodolfo Medina wrote:
> > 
> 
> > Of course, if you really want TOTAL control of your GUI, a window
> > manager is the way to go.  That's what I did.  Installed Openbox.
> > The same WM that LXDE uses.  A little more work, but worth it.
> > 
> > 
> 
> i'll second the use of openbox.  i use it with fbpanel.
> 
> i too believe that gnome just pulls in way too much "stuff".
> 
> the most inconvenient thing about not using gnome is not having a way
> to handle USS mass storage devices.

I wrote a generic udev rule for that.  Of course, there are also
mounting utilities that do the same thing.  But I opted for the
light-on-resources rule instead.

B


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Re: Book questions

[David Wright]

Quoting Petter Adsen (pet...@synth.no):
> On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 09:35:25 -0700
> David Christensen  wrote:
> > I'd advise learning one language well, where "well" includes security 
> > best practices.  Understand that learning any modern language takes a 
> > lot of time and effort.  So pick one that is good at solving the
> > kinds of problems that you are motivated to work on, because the
> > going will get tough and you'll have to find the tenacity to struggle
> > through.
> 
> I can see the logic in that. The issue with that is that I need them
> for two separate things - I want to learn C to get a deeper
> understanding of how Linux works, and I was initially thinking about
> Python for sysadmin tasks that I can't or don't know how to do in shell
> scripts.

If your target is *understanding* linux, then I'd disagree with the
first paragraph.

Learning computer languages is like learning foreign ones: aged 15 I
could read Xenophon in Greek but writing sentences was a struggle.
To understand linux, you'll need to understand C, shells, several
scripting languages, and specialist tools (coccigrep's a new one to
me), but you don't have to be able to write in them.

OTOH to do sysadmin you need to be able to write basic shell programs
and in a scripting language. I say *basic* shell: if it requires bash
arrays or more than two lines of , say, awk, then I switch the whole
thing into python.

> Maybe Perl would be a better fit for the last, I was at some point
> thinking of learning _basic_ GUI programming, and a friend recommended
> Python for that. He is also the person I am most likely to go to for
> advice, so learning Python would be good, because that's what he knows.

Jolly good idea.

Cheers,
David.


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Re: Book questions

[Reco]

 Hi.

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 05:18:09AM -0700, Rusi Mody wrote:
> On Monday, April 13, 2015 at 12:30:03 PM UTC+5:30, Petter Adsen wrote:
> > On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 09:35:25 -0700
> > David Christensen wrote:
> > 
> > > On 04/12/2015 01:33 AM, Petter Adsen wrote:> OK, thank you, I will 
> > > definitely consider Perl also, as I already know
> > >  > a little and have a few books on it.
> > > 
> > > I'd advise learning one language well, where "well" includes security 
> > > best practices.  Understand that learning any modern language takes a 
> > > lot of time and effort.  So pick one that is good at solving the
> > > kinds of problems that you are motivated to work on, because the
> > > going will get tough and you'll have to find the tenacity to struggle
> > > through.
> > 
> > I can see the logic in that. The issue with that is that I need them
> > for two separate things - I want to learn C to get a deeper
> > understanding of how Linux works, and I was initially thinking about
> > Python for sysadmin tasks that I can't or don't know how to do in shell
> > scripts.
> 
> One way to fry a brain is to learn C.

Please. I'd understand if it was C++ or Java. Learning C is simple and
fun. Just read classic K&R treatise, do all the examples. Did so back in
high school, and no brain was damaged in the process :)
The only problem today is to get a C compiler that understands K&R C.

And yes, about the only *reasonable* way to understand Linux is to do
write something which (ab)using syscalls. And that's something best done
in C (maybe Perl).


> Another way to fry the brain is to struggle with regular expressions.
> Unless you like a double-fried brain I suggest doing strictly one at a time.

Now that's something I tend to agree with. One just need to see RFC822
fully compliant regexp to beleive.


> 20+ years ago I wrote a rant on why teaching (and ∴ learning) C causes grief:
> http://blog.languager.org/2013/02/c-in-education-and-software-engineering.html
> 
> In one way it shows a lot of traps and pitfalls of beginners.
> It also recommends better paradigms than C for learning programming.
> 
> If python had existed then I would have recommended it.

[1] says - appeared: 1991. Qualifies for 20 years IMO.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)

Reco


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Re: apt stuck at "Reading database"

[Curt]

On 2015-04-13, Jape Person  wrote:
>
> IIRC apt-listbugs or apt-listchanges (or both) don't work without the 
> deb-src entries in /etc/apt/sources.list. I think these are tools that 

They don't?  Is that documented somewhere?

> Debian users should be encouraged to use. At the least they provide a 
> bit of a heads-up to the unwary during installations and upgrades.

I used apt-listbugs when I ran testing to avoid unpleasant surprises
(you just hold off on upgrading a day or two, and the surprise usually
goes away of its own accord).

For stable I don't see the point.

> But I do get your point.
>

Depends what flavor (stable, testing, experiemental) of Debian
you're running, IMHO.


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Re: gnome-settings-daemon, dbus use about %80 of CPU

[claude juif]

Hi,

Can you check xsession log Xorg.log for any errors that might happens ?

I see you take a screenshot from a X windows terminal, so X is responsive.

Regards,

2015-04-09 21:02 GMT+02:00 Magdi Mahmoud :

>  Hi
>
>
>
> Please find the system info below the issue happening  at least once a day
> when trying to move to going between  windows
>
>
>
>
>
> Linux lamborghini 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt7-1 (2015-03-01)
> x86_64 GNU/Linux
>
> 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th
> Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 06)
>
>total   used   free
> sharedbuffers cached
> Mem:  163448561490504   14854352 176264  37924 621124
> -/+ buffers/cache: 831456   15513400
> Swap:0  0  0
>
>
> [image: Description: Inline image 1]
>
> Thanks
>
> M
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* claude juif [mailto:claude.j...@gmail.com]
> *Sent:* 08 April 2015 11:17
> *To:* Magdi Mahmoud
> *Cc:* debian-user@lists.debian.org
> *Subject:* Re: gnome-settings-daemon, dbus use about %80 of CPU
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
>
>
> We need more informations (a lot more) on this.
>
>
>
> Computer Arch ? Video Card ? Amount of RAM ? Is the system swapping ? X
> logs ? What are your X drivers ?
>
>
>
> If you don't give us something to work on we can't do anything.
>
>
>
>
>
> PS: We read your email, no need to send it 3 or 4 times
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 2015-04-08 11:33 GMT+02:00 Magdi Mahmoud :
>
>
>
> Hi All,
>
>
>
> I have a problem with rel. 8.0 testing  since installed  sometimes
> randomly  getting about %80  of CPU busy and X-Win doesn’t responding
>
> gnome-settings-daemon, dbus   daemon utilise  about %70-%80.
>
>
>
> Can someone  advise please
>
>
>
>
>
> Thank you
>
>
>
> Mag
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> This email and any attachments may be confidential and/or legally
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> 8TH
>
>
>

Re: debian 8

[Bret Busby]

On 13/04/2015, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh  wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2015, at 23:52, Bret Busby wrote:
>> What they told me, is that the problem was solved by removing the
>> battery, for about 15 minutes, then reinstalling the battery, and that
>> the cause is that sometimes, operating systems do not shutdown
>> properly.
>
> Looks like the usual firmware quality issues, here.  The problem is really
> caused by halfbaked BIOS/UEFI/EC firmware, but the motherboard vendor will
> NOT fix that and will blame the operating system instead.  Unless it is a
> server, then they fix it really fast.
>
> The workaround for this class of problems is to "brain-dead" the box: for
> deskptop and servers, unplugging from main power for a few minutes should do
> it, but for laptops you must remove the batteries and press the power button
> several times (for long periods)... it is even a long-time documented
> procedure on IBM and Lenovo Thinkpads.
>
> For the record, the procedure for (modern) thinkpads is: remove battery
> packs and AC power, press power button for 4-5s at least 10 times, then
> follow with a long press (longer than 13s) at least once.
>
> Sometimes it will also be necessary to remove the backup (RTC/CMOS) battery.
>  In that case you will likely have to leave the box unpowered (do not
> reconnect any of the batteries or power) for several hours (try at least 12
> hours) AFTER you did the power-button dance above, to actually reset
> everything.
>
>> According to them, the whole of the problem, was the failure of the
>> last used operating system, to properly shutdown.
>
> Depends how you look at it, I guess. In my book, when firmware _and_
> hardware fail to ensure a box power downs properly in the power-down path,
> and that it resets everything properly from any invalid states in the
> power-up path, it is a firmware and/or hardware defect (often a design
> shortcoming in the hardware case), not an operating system defect.
>
> --
>   "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
>   them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
>   where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
>   Henrique de Moraes Holschuh 
>
>


Thank you for the information.

I certainly can't challenge any of it, for two simple reasons.

1. It is way beyond my knowledge of computers, so it is an area where,
in the absence of contrary information, I accept what I am told.

2. As indicated in earlier posts, the two computers to which I have
referred; the Acer V3-772G and the Acer E5-521-238Q (I think that is
the model number of the newer one - it is in my previous posts), both
have the poor quality Insyde20 (?) (Inshite20) (I think it is) Setup
Utility, that controls whether the computer boots into UEFI or BIOS,
and forces Secure Boot when the computer boots into UEFI. So the "The
problem is really caused by halfbaked IOS/UEFI/EC firmware" sounds
quite credible. Acer needs to provide a decent Setup Utility with its
computers. The Setup Utitility (the Inshite20 one) appears to be third
party, and, not from the motherboards manufacturer(s), but, I could be
wrong in that.

Unfortunately, the newer computer being a computer less than ten years
old, did not come with a printed manual, and I can not easily remove
the battery, so I will need to make a warranty claim on it - it is, I
think, less than a month old, or, at most, less than three months old.

What happens with the computer, now, is that, when I press the power
button, a blue light flashes five times and then stops, and that is
all that happens.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992




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Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[David Wright]

Quoting Floris (jkflo...@dds.nl):
> Op Sun, 12 Apr 2015 21:14:47 +0200 schreef David Wright 
> :
> >Quoting Rodolfo Medina (rodolfo.med...@gmail.com):
> >>According to documentations, gnome-core package is considered to
> >>be the very
> >>minimal gnome installation in Debian.  But in my personal
> >>experience it is not
> >>so.
> >
> >Which documentation? Without seeing it, we can't tell whether the doc
> >is well-worded or not.
> >
> 
> I think Rodolfo had read:
> https://wiki.debian.org/Gnome
> 
   > >GNOME (core only) 
   > >gnome-core package
   > >This is a minimalist GNOME installation
   > >(You have to install all end-user applications later). Above
   > >packages depend on this one.

[note: your quoting method for this wikitext
makes it appear that I wrote it.]

> and I agree that the sentence "You have to install all end-user
> applications later" is incorrect.

I think it's a case of Caveat Lector because this is a wiki page.

"There are four options to install GNOME in Debian:"

I'm counting five in the following list.

"GNOME (core only) gnome-core package This is a minimalist GNOME 
installation"

People are minimalists, installations can be minimal. This one
obviously isn't the latter, and doesn't itself claim to be.

"(You have to install all end-user applications later)."

> Even Iceweasel is a dependency of gnome-core. I didn't know that
> Mozilla is a part of gnome.

... so there's *one* end-user application already installed for a start.

"Above packages depend on this one."

What does "above" mean? gnome-core appears not to depend on
gnome-accessibility, the item immediately above it in the list.
(Notwithstanding that gnome-accessibility is actually a package in
squeeze, not wheezy.)

Cheers,
David.


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Re: debian 8

[Petter Adsen]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 23:23:54 +0800
Bret Busby  wrote:
> 2. As indicated in earlier posts, the two computers to which I have
> referred; the Acer V3-772G and the Acer E5-521-238Q (I think that is
> the model number of the newer one - it is in my previous posts), both
> have the poor quality Insyde20 (?) (Inshite20) (I think it is) Setup
> Utility, that controls whether the computer boots into UEFI or BIOS,
> and forces Secure Boot when the computer boots into UEFI. So the "The
> problem is really caused by halfbaked IOS/UEFI/EC firmware" sounds
> quite credible. Acer needs to provide a decent Setup Utility with its
> computers. The Setup Utitility (the Inshite20 one) appears to be third
> party, and, not from the motherboards manufacturer(s), but, I could be
> wrong in that.

They very often are.

> Unfortunately, the newer computer being a computer less than ten years
> old, did not come with a printed manual, and I can not easily remove
> the battery, so I will need to make a warranty claim on it - it is, I
> think, less than a month old, or, at most, less than three months old.

I do not know if this will solve your problem, but I found a manual for
what I believe is your machine on Acer's website, and put it on my
Dropbox account for you:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/09lfo01vnl9z9d7/UM_asE5-571_531_551_521_511_EN_Win8.1_v2.pdf?dl=0

Page 49 describes how to remove the battery pack, so with that guide in
hand you can try to do it yourself without handing it in for a two week
wait. I can't imagine that doing this would in any way affect your
warranty.

Good luck.

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."


pgpnM5QXPWvBR.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[Floris]

Op Mon, 13 Apr 2015 17:28:29 +0200 schreef David Wright  
:



Quoting Floris (jkflo...@dds.nl):
Op Sun, 12 Apr 2015 21:14:47 +0200 schreef David Wright  
:

>Quoting Rodolfo Medina (rodolfo.med...@gmail.com):
>>According to documentations, gnome-core package is considered to
>>be the very
>>minimal gnome installation in Debian.  But in my personal
>>experience it is not
>>so.
>
>Which documentation? Without seeing it, we can't tell whether the doc
>is well-worded or not.
>

I think Rodolfo had read:
https://wiki.debian.org/Gnome


   > >GNOME (core only)   
   > >gnome-core package  
   > >This is a minimalist GNOME installation
   > >(You have to install all end-user applications later). Above
   > >packages depend on this one.

[note: your quoting method for this wikitext
makes it appear that I wrote it.]

[sorry]



and I agree that the sentence "You have to install all end-user
applications later" is incorrect.


I think it's a case of Caveat Lector because this is a wiki page.

"There are four options to install GNOME in Debian:"

I'm counting five in the following list.

	"GNOME (core only) gnome-core package This is a minimalist GNOME  
installation"


People are minimalists, installations can be minimal. This one
obviously isn't the latter, and doesn't itself claim to be.

"(You have to install all end-user applications later)."


Even Iceweasel is a dependency of gnome-core. I didn't know that
Mozilla is a part of gnome.


... so there's *one* end-user application already installed for a start.

"Above packages depend on this one."

What does "above" mean? gnome-core appears not to depend on
gnome-accessibility, the item immediately above it in the list.
(Notwithstanding that gnome-accessibility is actually a package in
squeeze, not wheezy.)

Cheers,
David.




So the conclusion is that the information on wiki.debian.org/Gnome is
unclear and sometimes incorrect. I've added debian-...@lists.debian.org.
I understood they are the wiki maintainers.

Floris


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Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[David Wright]

[I'm hoping this isn't a duplicate post, but my first
attempt was rejected by bendel.debian.org as forged.]

Quoting Patrick Bartek (nemomm...@gmail.com):
> On Sun, 12 Apr 2015, bri...@aracnet.com wrote:
> > i'll second the use of openbox.  i use it with fbpanel.
> >
> > i too believe that gnome just pulls in way too much "stuff".
> >
> > the most inconvenient thing about not using gnome is not having a
way
> > to handle USS mass storage devices.
>
> I wrote a generic udev rule for that.  Of course, there are also
> mounting utilities that do the same thing.  But I opted for the
> light-on-resources rule instead.

Care to share it?

Cheers,
David.


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Re: debian 8

[Curt]

On 2015-04-13, Petter Adsen  wrote:
>
> Page 49 describes how to remove the battery pack, so with that guide in
> hand you can try to do it yourself without handing it in for a two week
> wait. I can't imagine that doing this would in any way affect your
> warranty.
>

I was going to say hope that doesn't void his warranty.


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Re: debian 8

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 13 April 2015 08:07:40 Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2015, at 23:52, Bret Busby wrote:
> > What they told me, is that the problem was solved by removing the
> > battery, for about 15 minutes, then reinstalling the battery, and
> > that the cause is that sometimes, operating systems do not shutdown
> > properly.
>
> Looks like the usual firmware quality issues, here.  The problem is
> really caused by halfbaked BIOS/UEFI/EC firmware, but the motherboard
> vendor will NOT fix that and will blame the operating system instead. 
> Unless it is a server, then they fix it really fast.
>
> The workaround for this class of problems is to "brain-dead" the box:
> for deskptop and servers, unplugging from main power for a few minutes
> should do it, but for laptops you must remove the batteries and press
> the power button several times (for long periods)... it is even a
> long-time documented procedure on IBM and Lenovo Thinkpads.
>
> For the record, the procedure for (modern) thinkpads is: remove
> battery packs and AC power, press power button for 4-5s at least 10
> times, then follow with a long press (longer than 13s) at least once.
>
> Sometimes it will also be necessary to remove the backup (RTC/CMOS)
> battery.  In that case you will likely have to leave the box unpowered
> (do not reconnect any of the batteries or power) for several hours
> (try at least 12 hours) AFTER you did the power-button dance above, to
> actually reset everything.

What has become of the triplet of header pins on the motherboard that 
used to do that. Simply move the flea clip to the other end pair and 
count to 10, put it back where you found it.  In the normal position the 
cmos battery is connected.  In the other position the battery is not 
only disconnected, but the battery input to the cmos is forceably 
grounded, defeating the timing forced on you by any energy storage 
capacitor that may also be present in the circuit.

Do they not put that on the newer motherboards?

IMO no board without that should ever be considered for purchase.
YMMV of course...

> > According to them, the whole of the problem, was the failure of the
> > last used operating system, to properly shutdown.

And I will submit that if that is now the case, its a total B.S. excuse, 
likely forced on the board makers by you know who, who is a convicted 
monopolist and will do anything to survive in a world they might have 
helped create but have now been superceeded by a generally superior 
product that also happens to be essentially free.

In any event, the above certainly generates a sequence of questions to be 
asked of the peddler of any new board one might buy, questions that if 
the sales driod cannot readily answer or quickly find someone who does 
have the answer, would make me look for a peddler who is knowledgeable 
enough to answer with sensible, truthful answers.

> Depends how you look at it, I guess. In my book, when firmware _and_
> hardware fail to ensure a box power downs properly in the power-down
> path, and that it resets everything properly from any invalid states
> in the power-up path, it is a firmware and/or hardware defect (often a
> design shortcoming in the hardware case), not an operating system
> defect.

+1000 & Amen.

> --
>   "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
>   them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
>   where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
>   Henrique de Moraes Holschuh 

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 


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Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[Steve McIntyre]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 06:04:47PM +0200, Floris wrote:
>
>So the conclusion is that the information on wiki.debian.org/Gnome is
>unclear and sometimes incorrect. I've added debian-...@lists.debian.org.
>I understood they are the wiki maintainers.

Not in terms of content, no. That's up to the whole community of
developers and users to maintain.

If you believe there are real bugs in the content of pages on
wiki.d.o, feel free to create an account and fix them.

-- 
Steve McIntyre93...@debian.org
Debian wiki admin - wiki.debian.org


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Re: apt stuck at "Reading database"

[David Wright]

Quoting Chris Bannister (cbannis...@slingshot.co.nz):
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 11:50:40AM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> > In that situation, my first course of action would be to hide anything
> > but the essential sources.list contents of, basically, something like
> > 
> > # deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 7.1.0 _Wheezy_ - Official i386 NETINST 
> > Binary-1 20130615-21:53]/ wheezy main
> > 
> > deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main non-free contrib
> > deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main non-free contrib
> > 
> > deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
> > deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
> > 
> > deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib non-free
> > deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib 
> > non-free
> 
> I'd even argue that the deb-src entries are not necessary for the majority of
> Debian users. 

Whether or not they're necessary, I *think* I posted the standard
contents for someone selecting contrib non-free at installation time.
Standard, not minimal, which in the circumstances seemed appropriate.

And certainly better than trying to recover from a system crash by
dist-upgrading 126 packages with 8 extra source lists being consulted.
The priority being to get apt/dpkg back up on its feet, official
source lists will be safe here (and saves having to add them at a
later date for whatever purpose).

Cheers,
David.


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Re: Book questions

[Bret Busby]

On 13/04/2015, Reco  wrote:



>Learning C is simple and
> fun. Just read classic K&R treatise, do all the examples. Did so back in
> high school, and no brain was damaged in the process :)
> The only problem today is to get a C compiler that understands K&R C.
>

I have not programmed in "C" for about 20-25 years, now, but, from
memory, with compilers, like "C" compilers, don't they have a switch
that can be set,  so that they accept only ANSI code, such as ANSI
"C"?

> And yes, about the only *reasonable* way to understand Linux is to do
> write something which (ab)using syscalls. And that's something best done
> in C (maybe Perl).
>

I have just found my "C" programming lecture notes, from 1987. Apart
from Kernighan and Ritchie's "The "C" Programming Language", a
recommended text, was "A Practical Guide to UNIX System V" by Mark and
Sobell..

I assume that Linux is sufficiently close to UNIX, to use similar
principles, such as pre-emptive multitasking and forks and killing
children, etc, and, when I started learning about UNIX, in terms of
the operating principles, from memory, books about operating systems,
such as
Operating Systems - Design and Implementation - by Tanenbaum
Operating System Concepts - by Silberschatz

The first of the two, was a red book, from memory, published, I think,
by Prentice Hall, and it related to the development of Minix, which
was the forerunner to Linux, and, I believe that Linus Torvalds
developed Linux, as an expansion of Minix and possibly started with
that book, or something like it (I stand to be corrected, on in this
belief).

These books are from 20-30 years ago, in the learning of operating
systems and UNIX; in the design and implementation.

The question is, what is the nature of the understanding that you want
of Linux? Is it the interaction between the layers, for example, the
HAL and the higher layers; is it the multitasking; is it understanding
administration (such as, do not do one of the whoopsies - using "chmod
.", as one (other) student did, when I was learning UNIX), is it
scripting and shell processing, or, is it the "design and
implementation" of the operating system, and, in that, does what you
want, include comparative design and implementation of operating
systems?

I am no expert (my knowledge is quite limited) in the intricacies of
the Linux operating system, but, many books exist, about various
aspects of operating systems, including the UNIX-based operating
systems

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992




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Re: Excluding a directory from tar

[Jean-Marc]

Mon, 13 Apr 2015 16:15:42 +0200
Petter Adsen  écrivait :

hi Petter,

> I've been trying to make a tarball of my home directory, but I want to
> exclude ~/.cache. First I tried '--exclude="~/.cache", but it didn't
> work. Neither did '--exclude="~/.cache/*".

Can you send the command you used ?
It will be easier to find what's wrong.

> 
> I got it working by creating an empty file in ~/.cache and using the
> filename as an argument to "--exclude-tag-under", but what was I doing
> wrong when trying to use "--exclude"?

Maybe the prefix you used (~).

Try with

tar -cvf /dev/null --exclude=.cache $HOME | less

Redirecting your archive to /dev/null is a way to make a dry run.

> 
> Petter, curious


Jean-Marc 


pgp32dfw4sEen.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[Floris]

Op Mon, 13 Apr 2015 18:33:20 +0200 schreef Steve McIntyre  
<93...@debian.org>:



On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 06:04:47PM +0200, Floris wrote:


So the conclusion is that the information on wiki.debian.org/Gnome is
unclear and sometimes incorrect. I've added debian-...@lists.debian.org.
I understood they are the wiki maintainers.


Not in terms of content, no. That's up to the whole community of
developers and users to maintain.

If you believe there are real bugs in the content of pages on
wiki.d.o, feel free to create an account and fix them.



I would like to create an account and edit the wiki, but unfortunately
English isn't my native language and I know my grammar is very bad.

Floris


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Re: debian 8

[Bret Busby]

On 13/04/2015, Petter Adsen  wrote:


>
> I do not know if this will solve your problem, but I found a manual for
> what I believe is your machine on Acer's website, and put it on my
> Dropbox account for you:
>
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/09lfo01vnl9z9d7/UM_asE5-571_531_551_521_511_EN_Win8.1_v2.pdf?dl=0
>
> Page 49 describes how to remove the battery pack, so with that guide in
> hand you can try to do it yourself without handing it in for a two week
> wait. I can't imagine that doing this would in any way affect your
> warranty.
>

Hello.

I apologise for asking this, but, as the dropbox web site requires
javascript, and, in the top right corner of the screen, is ,
could you please send to me (off-list) by email, a copy of the PDF
file?

Depending on the limits of your email facilities, I should be able to
receive it, if you are able to send it.

Thank you in anticipation.


-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992




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Re: reading an empty directory after reboot is very slow

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 13 April 2015 09:41:03 Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2015-04-13 14:45:25 +0200, Loïc Grenié wrote:
> > 2015-04-13 14:39 GMT+02:00 Vincent Lefevre :
> > > The problem is that this operation is (always?) very slow:
> > > something like 100 seconds (1 minute and 40 seconds). It has been
> > > reproducible for several months. The logs show nothing during this
> > > operation.
> > >
> > > Any idea?
> >
> > Maybe the directory is very large (even though its empty). Try
> >
> > ls -ld tmp.
> >
> >  and see if the file "tmp" is large.
>
> Thanks! I didn't know that (I thought that the file system would
> automatically "optimize" directories when files are removed, so
> I've never looked closely at their size). Indeed:
>
> ypig:~/eftests> ls -ld tmp
> drwxr-xr-x 2 vlefevre vlefevre 29655040 2015-04-13 15:25:55 tmp/

I wonder if our "sort" utilities also do that file shrink?

Unrelated of course, but of all the directory sorters I have written for 
a much smaller OS, one whose "dir" command presents you with an unsorted 
listing, we have dsort for cli use, and gsort for use when called by a 
gui button.  Both of these basically do a bubble sort on the directory, 
which in this examnple case is itself a file, with the output of the 
sort being re-written as the sorted list, with all the deleted entries 
removed, and the directory file itself truncated at the end of the last 
valid entry.  Otherwise, this file systems directories can grow quite 
large even if it does reuse the data slot occupied by a deleted file for 
a new file entry to conserve space.

If that is a solution and I've not a clue if it is, its something that 

A. Works "insitu" without all the hoorah of the cp and mv commands I saw 
previously in this thread.

And B. just as easily made into a crontab entry to be performed daily for 
instance.  One less bit of housekeeping YOU have to worry about.

I'll get me coat now...

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 


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Re: debian 8

[Petter Adsen]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 12:29:48 -0400
Gene Heskett  wrote:
> On Monday 13 April 2015 08:07:40 Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > Sometimes it will also be necessary to remove the backup (RTC/CMOS)
> > battery.  In that case you will likely have to leave the box
> > unpowered (do not reconnect any of the batteries or power) for
> > several hours (try at least 12 hours) AFTER you did the
> > power-button dance above, to actually reset everything.
> 
> What has become of the triplet of header pins on the motherboard that 
> used to do that. Simply move the flea clip to the other end pair and 
> count to 10, put it back where you found it.  In the normal position
> the cmos battery is connected.  In the other position the battery is
> not only disconnected, but the battery input to the cmos is forceably 
> grounded, defeating the timing forced on you by any energy storage 
> capacitor that may also be present in the circuit.
> 
> Do they not put that on the newer motherboards?

I don't know, my newest motherboard is 3-4 years old, and while it is
thankfully not new enough to have UEFI, it does have these pins.
Clearly mentioned in the manual, too.

> IMO no board without that should ever be considered for purchase.
> YMMV of course...

Amen. But the OP's machine is a laptop, and the owner had difficulty
with removing the battery without the user manual. Disregarding whether
or not he should even attempt this at all, it would involve opening his
still-under-warranty machine to such a degree that it would now become
a no-longer-under-warranty machine :)

So whether or not the pins are there is not really that important in
this setting, I would think. But I totally agree with you :)

> In any event, the above certainly generates a sequence of questions
> to be asked of the peddler of any new board one might buy, questions
> that if the sales driod cannot readily answer or quickly find someone
> who does have the answer, would make me look for a peddler who is
> knowledgeable enough to answer with sensible, truthful answers.

I am also a little wary of his statement that it took them two _weeks_
to examine a machine he delivered to them for service. Where I live, a
small place in Norway, the people I use will normally do things within
a few hours. And it's not like they have lots of competition, either.

Maybe I'm just spoiled & lucky, though.

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."


pgpmx9FVjyU7v.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[David Wright]

Quoting Steve McIntyre (93...@debian.org):
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 06:04:47PM +0200, Floris wrote:
> >
> >So the conclusion is that the information on wiki.debian.org/Gnome is
> >unclear and sometimes incorrect. I've added debian-...@lists.debian.org.
> >I understood they are the wiki maintainers.
> 
> Not in terms of content, no. That's up to the whole community of
> developers and users to maintain.
> 
> If you believe there are real bugs in the content of pages on
> wiki.d.o, feel free to create an account and fix them.

True. But I'll just explain why I'll not be doing that myself.

I made my original comment to ask for a reference to the documentation
the OP had read (and point out why removing a package had no immediate
consequences).

(Frequently, OPs don't seem to think of posting error messages,
specific symptoms, courses of action taken etc etc and these things
have to be solicited from them before problems become tractable.
On occasions it's like pulling teeth.)

Floris kindly found a possible reference which also seemed to me to be
a likely candidate (the OP hasn't confirmed or otherwise).

I looked at it with a critical eye and found some errors and
ambiguities. However, I'm not a Gnome user, so I have no idea whether
"There are four options to install GNOME in Debian:" is true, or
whether there's, say, another option that most Gnome users now use,
but no one has bothered to document.

So the most I could do is set up an account just to write "This list
entry may mislead you" on the page.

Sorry not to be more obliging.

Cheers,
David.


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Re: debian 8

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 13 April 2015 12:46:34 Bret Busby wrote:
> On 13/04/2015, Petter Adsen  wrote:
> 
>
> > I do not know if this will solve your problem, but I found a manual
> > for what I believe is your machine on Acer's website, and put it on
> > my Dropbox account for you:
> >
> > https://www.dropbox.com/s/09lfo01vnl9z9d7/UM_asE5-571_531_551_521_51
> >1_EN_Win8.1_v2.pdf?dl=0
> >
For those of us who would like to follow along and possoible learn 
something, but who do NOT have a dropbox account for one reason or the 
other, chief among them some copyright grabbing language in the T.O.S., 
I would remind you that dropboxes policy now is to show a sign in or 
join panel on top of any visible content for about 2 seconds, then 
clearing the screen and reloading the page which takes 3 or 4 seconds.

IOW, we cannot see whats at the link.

Is there not another service that is more "friendly" to the use its used 
for?

> > Page 49 describes how to remove the battery pack, so with that guide
> > in hand you can try to do it yourself without handing it in for a
> > two week wait. I can't imagine that doing this would in any way
> > affect your warranty.
>
> Hello.
>
> I apologise for asking this, but, as the dropbox web site requires
> javascript, and, in the top right corner of the screen, is ,
> could you please send to me (off-list) by email, a copy of the PDF
> file?
>
> Depending on the limits of your email facilities, I should be able to
> receive it, if you are able to send it.
>
> Thank you in anticipation.
>
>
> --
> Bret Busby
> Armadale
> West Australia
> ..
>
> "So once you do know what the question actually is,
>  you'll know what the answer means."
> - Deep Thought,
>  Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
>  "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
>  A Trilogy In Four Parts",
>  written by Douglas Adams,
>  published by Pan Books, 1992
>
> 

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 


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Re: Excluding a directory from tar

[Petter Adsen]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 18:41:50 +0200
Jean-Marc  wrote:

> Mon, 13 Apr 2015 16:15:42 +0200
> Petter Adsen  écrivait :
> 
> hi Petter,
> 
> > I've been trying to make a tarball of my home directory, but I want
> > to exclude ~/.cache. First I tried '--exclude="~/.cache", but it
> > didn't work. Neither did '--exclude="~/.cache/*".
> 
> Can you send the command you used ?
> It will be easier to find what's wrong.
> 
> > 
> > I got it working by creating an empty file in ~/.cache and using the
> > filename as an argument to "--exclude-tag-under", but what was I
> > doing wrong when trying to use "--exclude"?
> 
> Maybe the prefix you used (~).
> 
> Try with
> 
> tar -cvf /dev/null --exclude=.cache $HOME | less

That was, in essence, the command I used, and both you and Vincent are
right, the "~" was not expanded. For some reason I was absolutely
convinced that I had tried without it, but clearly I didn't. My shell
history confirms this.

So thank you, both, it is now working perfectly. :)

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."


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Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: apt stuck at "Reading database"

[Brian]

On Mon 13 Apr 2015 at 08:42:45 -0400, Jape Person wrote:

> >I'd even argue that the deb-src entries are not necessary for the majority of
> >Debian users.
> 
> IIRC apt-listbugs or apt-listchanges (or both) don't work without
> the deb-src entries in /etc/apt/sources.list. I think these are
> tools that Debian users should be encouraged to use. At the least
> they provide a bit of a heads-up to the unwary during installations
> and upgrades.

You would have to provide a source for the information in your first
sentence. One of my machines has a single line in sources.list and it
doesn't begin "deb-src". I agree apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges are
very useful for any user but the bug information really needs to be
checked with the BTS to get the full benefit of apt-listbugs.
 
> But I do get your point.

It is quite a good one. If you never re-build a deb package the line
is redundant.


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Re: Book questions

[Reco]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 12:36:28AM +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> On 13/04/2015, Reco  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> >Learning C is simple and
> > fun. Just read classic K&R treatise, do all the examples. Did so back in
> > high school, and no brain was damaged in the process :)
> > The only problem today is to get a C compiler that understands K&R C.
> >
> 
> I have not programmed in "C" for about 20-25 years, now, but, from
> memory, with compilers, like "C" compilers, don't they have a switch
> that can be set,  so that they accept only ANSI code, such as ANSI
> "C"?

*ANSI* C - yes. For instance, gcc has this wonderful '-ansi' switch.
It's even possible to choose the exact version of ANSI C standard (i.e.
-std=c99).
*K&R* C - no. At least, gcc-4.7 has no switch for this that I'm
aware of.


> The question is, what is the nature of the understanding that you want
> of Linux? Is it the interaction between the layers, for example, the
> HAL and the higher layers; is it the multitasking; is it understanding
> administration (such as, do not do one of the whoopsies - using "chmod
> .", as one (other) student did, when I was learning UNIX), is it
> scripting and shell processing, or, is it the "design and
> implementation" of the operating system, and, in that, does what you
> want, include comparative design and implementation of operating
> systems?

Let's see as I didn't have OS design in mind. Something like:

Exit codes and their value in real life.
Strings handling, memory allocation.
Process control and daemonisation (sp?).
Signal handling.
Inter-process communication (sockets, pipes).
IP protocol use and abuse.
Shared memory.
Threads.
Libraries and their usage.

Bonus points are granted if code can be compiled on more than one
processor architecture. Extra bonus points for doing it in more than one
POSIX-compatible OS.

Of course, those are basics. There's nothing in those that cannot
be implemented in any programming language.

But then - you encounter a mis-behaving program. You use strace(1) or
ltrace(1) and, hey, suddenly you understand what's going on without even
looking at the source. You can use gdb to pull out tricks deemed
impossible by others. You can use valgrind to point out memory leaks or
use-after-free. All that possible by the fact you've learned C, and
you can't get more closely to OS than using C.

That does not invalidate the fact that learning C as a first
programming language can be pretty hardcore (I was taught BASIC first,
then Pascal), and for the complex program you'll probably want something
else as by today's standards C has poor result/effort ratio.

And please think of the children :) Teaching young ones something as
volatile and ever-changing as Python (or, $DEITY forbid, Ruby) can be
considered cruel and abusive :)

Reco


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Re: debian 8

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 13 April 2015 12:50:08 Petter Adsen wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 12:29:48 -0400
>
> Gene Heskett  wrote:
> > On Monday 13 April 2015 08:07:40 Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > > Sometimes it will also be necessary to remove the backup
> > > (RTC/CMOS) battery.  In that case you will likely have to leave
> > > the box unpowered (do not reconnect any of the batteries or power)
> > > for several hours (try at least 12 hours) AFTER you did the
> > > power-button dance above, to actually reset everything.
> >
> > What has become of the triplet of header pins on the motherboard
> > that used to do that. Simply move the flea clip to the other end
> > pair and count to 10, put it back where you found it.  In the normal
> > position the cmos battery is connected.  In the other position the
> > battery is not only disconnected, but the battery input to the cmos
> > is forceably grounded, defeating the timing forced on you by any
> > energy storage capacitor that may also be present in the circuit.
> >
> > Do they not put that on the newer motherboards?
>
> I don't know, my newest motherboard is 3-4 years old, and while it is
> thankfully not new enough to have UEFI, it does have these pins.
> Clearly mentioned in the manual, too.
>
> > IMO no board without that should ever be considered for purchase.
> > YMMV of course...
>
> Amen. But the OP's machine is a laptop, and the owner had difficulty
> with removing the battery without the user manual. Disregarding
> whether or not he should even attempt this at all, it would involve
> opening his still-under-warranty machine to such a degree that it
> would now become a no-longer-under-warranty machine :)
>
> So whether or not the pins are there is not really that important in
> this setting, I would think. But I totally agree with you :)
>
I apparently did not consider that aspect Petter, and you are of coarse 
correct. A side remark is related to the tools used to open it and 
service it.  My laptop was opened to replace a dead dvd writer while it 
was still in warranty, (and the tried to wiggle out of it when they 
found it booted mandrake linux at the time) and the only cure for the 
torn up screws his worn out dime store tools tore up, is a full set of 
new screws. Knowing he would, I had brought my own precisely made set of 
small phillips screwdrivers along, and the tech refused to use them.  
Had he been my employee, he would have learned how to do that work 
properly, or would have been fired on the spot.  The old saying that his 
hands did not fit the tools was never more true. But he wasn't working 
for me, he was working for Circuit City.

In that event, I would simply ask that the warranty be honored, or the 
machine be replace in a timely manner ( 2 weeks is IMO hugely excessive 
unless it has to be ordered and shipped.) and I might remark in passing 
that I was friends with the local County Attorney. In our small county 
community of <10,000, that is not only an excellent chance of being the 
truth, and in this case she also knows I voted for her.  I have found it 
helpfull to "know someone" now and then. ;-)
  
> > In any event, the above certainly generates a sequence of questions
> > to be asked of the peddler of any new board one might buy, questions
> > that if the sales driod cannot readily answer or quickly find
> > someone who does have the answer, would make me look for a peddler
> > who is knowledgeable enough to answer with sensible, truthful
> > answers.
>
> I am also a little wary of his statement that it took them two _weeks_
> to examine a machine he delivered to them for service. Where I live, a
> small place in Norway, the people I use will normally do things within
> a few hours. And it's not like they have lots of competition, either.
>
> Maybe I'm just spoiled & lucky, though.
>
> Petter

Both Petter, fits me too although my luck has been phenominal on both 
sides of the mean from time to time.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 


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Re: debian 8

[Bret Busby]

On 14/04/2015, Petter Adsen  wrote:



>
> I am also a little wary of his statement that it took them two _weeks_
> to examine a machine he delivered to them for service. Where I live, a
> small place in Norway, the people I use will normally do things within
> a few hours. And it's not like they have lots of competition, either.
>

When I took the computer in, they told me that the delay was due to
their workload, and I believe that they were working on the premise
that it was likely something alot more than it ended up being, such as
a failed motherboard; but, even for a ten to fifteen minute job, if
they stopped what they were working on, to deal with problems that are
brought into them, as the new problems are brough in to them, they
would take much longer to complete the work that they had been working
on. It is a principle used in operating system task scheduling, with
(I believe) pre-emptive multitasking - unless a particular task has
higher priority, my understanding is that scheduling works on a FIFO
(First In, First Out) basis, so that work is done in the order that it
is received, and, if they had a backlog, with them being the sole
service provider, I simply had to wait my turn. It is queue
processing, as in a linked list - where additions to the list, are
added at the tail of the list, and, removals are removed from the head
of the list.

The shop where I took the computer to have it repaired, was a
contractor that was the sole provider for the Perth (capital of
Western Australia) metropolitan area, for servicing under a retail
chain's extended warranty service. And, it was a claim under an
extended warranty.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992




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Re: Excluding a directory from tar

[David Wright]

Quoting Petter Adsen (pet...@synth.no):
> I've been trying to make a tarball of my home directory, but I want to
> exclude ~/.cache. First I tried '--exclude="~/.cache", but it didn't
> work. Neither did '--exclude="~/.cache/*".
> 
> I got it working by creating an empty file in ~/.cache and using the
> filename as an argument to "--exclude-tag-under", but what was I doing
> wrong when trying to use "--exclude"?

I didn't know tar did that. I thought most people use find to generate
the filenames for tar to act on.

Then you'd be using a command something like

find -xdev -path './cache' -prune -o -print | tar ...

and the other advantage of this method is that you pipe it into less
until you get the files you want, then only then substitute tar.

Have fun reading man find, though!

Cheers,
David.


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Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[Brian]

On Mon 13 Apr 2015 at 12:00:52 -0500, David Wright wrote:

> Floris kindly found a possible reference which also seemed to me to be
> a likely candidate (the OP hasn't confirmed or otherwise).
> 
> I looked at it with a critical eye and found some errors and
> ambiguities. However, I'm not a Gnome user, so I have no idea whether
> "There are four options to install GNOME in Debian:" is true, or
> whether there's, say, another option that most Gnome users now use,
> but no one has bothered to document.
> 
> So the most I could do is set up an account just to write "This list
> entry may mislead you" on the page.

You could do better than that :). It took half a minute to discover that
the "GNOME accessibility" entry needs removing or the entry adjusted to
reflect what version of Debian it applies to. Following the link is
sufficient to see why.


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Re: debian 8

[Bret Busby]

On 14/04/2015, Bret Busby  wrote:
> On 14/04/2015, Petter Adsen  wrote:
>
> 
>
>>
>> I am also a little wary of his statement that it took them two _weeks_
>> to examine a machine he delivered to them for service. Where I live, a
>> small place in Norway, the people I use will normally do things within
>> a few hours. And it's not like they have lots of competition, either.
>>
>
> When I took the computer in, they told me that the delay was due to
> their workload, and I believe that they were working on the premise
> that it was likely something alot more than it ended up being, such as
> a failed motherboard; but, even for a ten to fifteen minute job, if
> they stopped what they were working on, to deal with problems that are
> brought into them, as the new problems are brough in to them, they
> would take much longer to complete the work that they had been working
> on. It is a principle used in operating system task scheduling, with
> (I believe) pre-emptive multitasking - unless a particular task has
> higher priority, my understanding is that scheduling works on a FIFO
> (First In, First Out) basis, so that work is done in the order that it
> is received, and, if they had a backlog, with them being the sole
> service provider, I simply had to wait my turn. It is queue
> processing, as in a linked list - where additions to the list, are
> added at the tail of the list, and, removals are removed from the head
> of the list.
>
> The shop where I took the computer to have it repaired, was a
> contractor that was the sole provider for the Perth (capital of
> Western Australia) metropolitan area, for servicing under a retail
> chain's extended warranty service. And, it was a claim under an
> extended warranty.
>


Oh, and I believe that the population of the "Perth metropolitan area"
is now supposed to have reached about 2.5 million people.

But, this newer computer, would be subject to the manufacturer's
warranty, and has not yet got to the extended warranty time.

So, depending on the nature of the problem (I assume that the flashing
blue light is indicative of the nature of the problem), it may simply
be a case of the computer being replaced (in which case, I would want
the HDD swapped over).

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992




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Re: apt stuck at "Reading database"

[David Wright]

Quoting Brian (a...@cityscape.co.uk):
> On Mon 13 Apr 2015 at 08:42:45 -0400, Jape Person wrote:
> 
> > >I'd even argue that the deb-src entries are not necessary for the majority 
> > >of
> > >Debian users.
> > 
> > IIRC apt-listbugs or apt-listchanges (or both) don't work without
> > the deb-src entries in /etc/apt/sources.list. I think these are
> > tools that Debian users should be encouraged to use. At the least
> > they provide a bit of a heads-up to the unwary during installations
> > and upgrades.
> 
> You would have to provide a source for the information in your first
> sentence. One of my machines has a single line in sources.list and it
> doesn't begin "deb-src".

So are you saying that the apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges tools work
for you on that machine? I'm dubious of the truth of needing deb-src
entries for them to work, but I have no evidence to the contrary bcause
I haven't removed my deb-src lines. (I also read their control files
and man pages, but it's not obvious how the former would express such
a dependency, and grep 'src' gives no matches in the latter.)

> I agree apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges are
> very useful for any user but the bug information really needs to be
> checked with the BTS to get the full benefit of apt-listbugs.

Yes, I thought it did that. (Or is there a fallback if the network
has gone down?)

> > But I do get your point.
> 
> It is quite a good one. If you never re-build a deb package the line
> is redundant.

Perhaps I should have trimmed the posting of my AFAICT standard Debian
/etc/apt/sources.list considering the debate it's engendered.
I would have been better pleased if someone were to firm up the
options available if my suggestions didn't fix the problem. I only
posted at all because this guy had been sitting on a non-functioning
machine for at least 5 days by (my) Sunday morning.

Cheers,
David.


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Re: debian 8

[Petter Adsen]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 13:04:28 -0400
Gene Heskett  wrote:
> On Monday 13 April 2015 12:46:34 Bret Busby wrote:
> > On 13/04/2015, Petter Adsen  wrote:
> > 
> >
> > > I do not know if this will solve your problem, but I found a
> > > manual for what I believe is your machine on Acer's website, and
> > > put it on my Dropbox account for you:
> > >
> > > https://www.dropbox.com/s/09lfo01vnl9z9d7/UM_asE5-571_531_551_521_51
> > >1_EN_Win8.1_v2.pdf?dl=0
> > >
> For those of us who would like to follow along and possoible learn 
> something, but who do NOT have a dropbox account for one reason or
> the other, chief among them some copyright grabbing language in the
> T.O.S., I would remind you that dropboxes policy now is to show a
> sign in or join panel on top of any visible content for about 2
> seconds, then clearing the screen and reloading the page which takes
> 3 or 4 seconds.

I just copied that link myself and opened it in Firefox. A "sign in or
log on" box was displayed, which I closed without doing either (click
on the "X"), and then got a page containing the name of the file with a
button marked "Download". I clicked the button, and got a menu with the
choices "direct download", and "download to my Dropbox". Clicking the
first downloaded the pdf in the normal fashion.

What, apart from using JavaScript (which I agree is not desirable), is
problematic?

> IOW, we cannot see whats at the link.

I could.

> Is there not another service that is more "friendly" to the use its
> used for?

Not that many that has Linux clients, unfortunately. I know of only two
- Google Drive (unofficial client only, and I dislike Google), and
CloudMe (where I haven't got any free space right now).

I could have posted the original link, but since I had to download a
zip and unpack it to see if the manual contained any information on
removing the battery in the first place, I just posted the link to
the pdf itself as that seemed simpler.

I was honestly just trying to help the OP in a way that was easy for us
both, and since my mother manages to download the files I put on
Dropbox for her, I just assumed it would be an acceptable solution.

Anyway, it's all academic now, as I've emailed the pdf to Bret.

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."


pgpOdK_ybuQzZ.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: WAS Re: debian 8 NOW game keyboard config

[Ric Moore]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 10:39:31PM -0400, Ric Moore wrote:

On 04/11/2015 04:31 PM, Reco wrote:
>  Hi.
>
>On Sat, 11 Apr 2015 16:00:11 -0400
>Ric Moore  wrote:
>
>>On 04/11/2015 03:05 PM, Reco wrote:
>>>dpkg-reconfigure -plow keyboard-configuration
>>
>>ric@iam:~$ sudo su -
>>[sudo] password for ric:
>>root@iam:~# dpkg-reconfigure -plow keyboard-configuration
>>update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported;
>>falling back to defaults
>>update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported;
>>falling back to defaults
>>root@iam:~#
>>
>>Err... does that mean nothing happened?
>
>Yes and no. Yes, because dpkg-reconfigure did not ask you any questions
>(and with priority=low it should ask you at least some).
>No, because debconf was run.
>
>Unless you provide an output of 'strace -f dpkg-reconfigure -plow
>keyboard-configuration' - that will remain a mystery.
>
>
>>Is there a single file tucked  away someplace with the keyboard layout?
>>Using XFCE desktop on Jessie with systemd enabled.
>
>/etc/default/keyboard should have it all. Unless, of course, you have:
>
>- some 'accessibility options' enabled (meaning - some application
>'helpfully' stealing your Shift, Ctrl or Alt keypresses)
>- overridden keyboard layout switch by means of XFCE
>(xfce4-xkb-plugin)
>- binded Ctrl keypresses for some hotkey (gtk-can-change-accels)
>- using ibus (or some other Input Method™)
>- used some systemd helper to override /etc/default/keyboard (localectl)
>
>Basically, the more software you have installed - the more
>possibilities you have the things to go haywire.
>
>
>>Here's what happened:
>>
>>I was playing warzone2100 and got finger fumbled setting a group of
>>trucks to group 5, (using ctrl 5).
>
>So, long story short - you have misbehaving Ctrl key (possibly others
>too) in any SDL1 application. Took 5 minutes (and several roundtrips
>from their git to their wiki) to figure the dependencies of this
>'warzone2100', and did I mention how I hate it when upstream tries their
>best to hide dependencies?
>
>Try replacing xfwm4 (aka stock XFCE4 window manager) with something
>else, say, openbox. See how it goes then.



I did just that per your suggestion. Warzone2100 STILL does it. But,
if I boot Ubuntu on another drive on the same machine, no problem.


You're an changing an awful lot with that reboot. Starting with systemd
→ upstart for example.



So, I dinked something up pecurliar to Debian/XCFE. Again, all three
versions of Warzone I jhave installed each has it's own dot config
directory. Here's the keyboard file:
-
ric@iam:/etc/default$ more keyboard
# KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE

# Consult the keyboard(5) manual page.

XKBMODEL="pc104"
XKBLAYOUT="us"
XKBVARIANT=""
XKBOPTIONS="terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"

BACKSPACE="guess"
ric@iam:/etc/default$
--
Nothing strange there.


Indeed. The usual run-of-the-mill single-layout preferences.


I dug through all of the .config directories
and found nothing glaring. So, I created a new user and the same
thing happens. Ergo, it is system wide??


Did you check /etc/xdg?

If there's nothing fishy in there too - I'm out of ideas, sorry.

Reco


--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html



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Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[David Wright]

Quoting Brian (a...@cityscape.co.uk):
> On Mon 13 Apr 2015 at 12:00:52 -0500, David Wright wrote:
> 
> > Floris kindly found a possible reference which also seemed to me to be
> > a likely candidate (the OP hasn't confirmed or otherwise).
> > 
> > I looked at it with a critical eye and found some errors and
> > ambiguities. However, I'm not a Gnome user, so I have no idea whether
> > "There are four options to install GNOME in Debian:" is true, or
> > whether there's, say, another option that most Gnome users now use,
> > but no one has bothered to document.
> > 
> > So the most I could do is set up an account just to write "This list
> > entry may mislead you" on the page.
> 
> You could do better than that :). It took half a minute to discover that
> the "GNOME accessibility" entry needs removing or the entry adjusted to
> reflect what version of Debian it applies to. Following the link is
> sufficient to see why.

I downloaded both the squeeze package (with the matching name) and the
wheezy package (~-themes suggested by the Packages page), but on
noticing that the new one is 100 times the size of the old, I realised
I'm out of my depth again. If things like accessibility have undergone
a major repackaging experience, then there's even more reason to think
that the "options to install GNOME in Debian" have quite possibly
changed drastically. (And I can't see the point in documenting
squeeze's choices for installing Gnome any longer.)

My earlier posts (not this thread) have included questions about what
exactly do DEs bring to the table over and above WMs. I'm ignorant.

Cheers,
David.


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Re: apt stuck at "Reading database"

[Jape Person]

On 04/13/2015 01:11 PM, Brian wrote:

On Mon 13 Apr 2015 at 08:42:45 -0400, Jape Person wrote:


I'd even argue that the deb-src entries are not necessary for the majority of
Debian users.


IIRC apt-listbugs or apt-listchanges (or both) don't work without
the deb-src entries in /etc/apt/sources.list. I think these are
tools that Debian users should be encouraged to use. At the least
they provide a bit of a heads-up to the unwary during installations
and upgrades.


You would have to provide a source for the information in your first
sentence. One of my machines has a single line in sources.list and it
doesn't begin "deb-src". I agree apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges are
very useful for any user but the bug information really needs to be
checked with the BTS to get the full benefit of apt-listbugs.



Yup, I would have to provide a source, but I don't seem to be able to do so.

I do remember years ago deciding to remove the deb-src lines in my 
sources.list file and finding to my dismay that I couldn't see 
changelongs for files which I was preparing to upgrade. This was when I 
was using aptitude in interactive TUI mode. It was my habit to hit "u" 
to get aptitude to update its cache and then + followed by  
twice to see the list of proposed upgrades. Then I'd highlight a package 
of interest and use aptitude to view the changelog.


I asked about it on this list (I think) and someone told me that I 
needed the deb-src lines to see the changelog in aptitude. When I added 
the deb-src back to sources.list, I regained the changelog function. I 
remember thinking at the time that this seemed more like a bug than a 
feature.


I should have stated all of that information when I posted about this 
earlier. Sorry.


I wonder if I'm misremembering, or if this was actually the case. After 
further reflection I am also thinking that I was not yet using 
apt-listbugs at that time, so it would have been apt-changelog that 
wasn't working for me. I think I only started using apt-listbugs last year.


If I get a little time later today, I'll do a little experimentation to 
see if I can see any evidence whatsoever that might confirm my earlier 
presumption.



But I do get your point.


It is quite a good one. If you never re-build a deb package the line
is redundant.



Yup.

Best,
JP


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Re: debian 8

[Petter Adsen]

On Tue, 14 Apr 2015 01:28:57 +0800
Bret Busby  wrote:

> On 14/04/2015, Petter Adsen  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> >
> > I am also a little wary of his statement that it took them two
> > _weeks_ to examine a machine he delivered to them for service.
> > Where I live, a small place in Norway, the people I use will
> > normally do things within a few hours. And it's not like they have
> > lots of competition, either.
> >
> 
> When I took the computer in, they told me that the delay was due to
> their workload, and I believe that they were working on the premise
> that it was likely something alot more than it ended up being, such as
> a failed motherboard; but, even for a ten to fifteen minute job, if
> they stopped what they were working on, to deal with problems that are
> brought into them, as the new problems are brough in to them, they
> would take much longer to complete the work that they had been working
> on. It is a principle used in operating system task scheduling, with
> (I believe) pre-emptive multitasking - unless a particular task has
> higher priority, my understanding is that scheduling works on a FIFO
> (First In, First Out) basis, so that work is done in the order that it
> is received, and, if they had a backlog, with them being the sole
> service provider, I simply had to wait my turn. It is queue
> processing, as in a linked list - where additions to the list, are
> added at the tail of the list, and, removals are removed from the head
> of the list.

Yes, I know how FIFO works :)

> The shop where I took the computer to have it repaired, was a
> contractor that was the sole provider for the Perth (capital of
> Western Australia) metropolitan area, for servicing under a retail
> chain's extended warranty service. And, it was a claim under an
> extended warranty.

I didn't pick up that it was under warranty - that may be the big
difference. The place I use, I have always come in with very specific
jobs that I didn't want to do myself to avoid breaking something that I
couldn't afford to replace ("please remove the massive CPU cooler and
install these DIMMs") and have always paid by the hour. That may
get higher priority than a warranty claim, as I don't expect there's any
guarantee on getting warranty maintenance done quickly...

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."


pgpQ1mFZ5__ee.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: Book questions

[Bret Busby]

On 14/04/2015, Reco  wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 12:36:28AM +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
>> On 13/04/2015, Reco  wrote:
>>
>> 
>>
>> >Learning C is simple and
>> > fun. Just read classic K&R treatise, do all the examples. Did so back
>> > in
>> > high school, and no brain was damaged in the process :)
>> > The only problem today is to get a C compiler that understands K&R C.
>> >
>>
>> I have not programmed in "C" for about 20-25 years, now, but, from
>> memory, with compilers, like "C" compilers, don't they have a switch
>> that can be set,  so that they accept only ANSI code, such as ANSI
>> "C"?
>
> *ANSI* C - yes. For instance, gcc has this wonderful '-ansi' switch.
> It's even possible to choose the exact version of ANSI C standard (i.e.
> -std=c99).
> *K&R* C - no. At least, gcc-4.7 has no switch for this that I'm
> aware of.
>

Okay - this is where the detail of the Kernighan & Ritchie book, is required.

You see, when I searched for "C" books, at amazon, I found at
http://www.amazon.com/The-Programming-Language-Brian-Kernighan/dp/8120305965/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=02E2S6076Y4MYDCXP9RE

"
The C Programming LanguageApr 1, 1988
by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie
"

"
The authors present the complete guide to ANSI standard C language
programming. Written by the developers of C, this new version helps
readers keep up with the finalized ANSI standard for C while showing
how to take advantage of C's rich set of operators, economy of
expression, improved control flow, and data structures. The 2/E has
been completely rewritten with additional examples and problem sets to
clarify the implementation of difficult language constructs. For
years, C programmers have let K&R guide them to building
well-structured and efficient programs. Now this same help is
available to those working with ANSI compilers. Includes detailed
coverage of the C language plus the official C language reference
manual for at-a-glance help with syntax notation, declarations, ANSI
changes, scope rules, and the list goes on and on.
"

So, the second edition, published in 1988, included ANSI "C", and, the
picture of the from cover of the book, has a big stamp on it; "ANSI
C".

So, it really depends on, if the original poster obtains, or, obtains
access to, a copy of the text "The C Programming Language" by
Kernighan and Ritchie, whether he gets a copy that is the second
edition (1988) or later.

If he gets a copy that is the second edition (1988), or later, then it
should be ANSI "C".

When I was learning "C", I found the (then available) Sam's Waite
Group "C" Bible to be a brilliant reference manual, as it was a
brilliant language reference manual.

But, a reference manual, and, a teaching course, are two different things.

And, one thing that I learnt, when I was learning 3GL programming
laguages, was that it was best, to stick to ANSI standard language,
for portability. Thus, when I wrote code to run on VAX11-VMS, or
PDP11-RSTS/e or UNIX SVR4 or CM/CMS  (I think it was) running on an
IBM-3081, or my PC-XT running DOS, the code would mostly run
unaltered, on each. As an example, I compared the processing speed of
my PC-XT, with the IBM-3081, during a vacation, with not many other
students around, running a Pascal program to approcimate pi using a
Chebyshev (I think that is the correct spelling) series approximation,
and the average speed, per minute, was, for the IBM3081, about 10
million iterations, and, on my PC-XT, about 10,000 iterations. Using
ANSI standard code, meant that the same code could be used on each
system. I believe that, if a person learns programming in a 3GL, it is
best to adhere to the ANSI standard for the language, if an ANSI
standard exists for the language, for portability.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992




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Debian 8 jessie long running sudo and X login

[deloptes]

Hi community,
After upgrade to jessie I had one more strange experience.
For some reason krb5-user was installed and I remember asking me about
windows domain authentication. As I use this computer at work as well I
said yes (there is domain which I could use to authenticate). However
before I get there I have work to do, but I noticed that when I login to
the local machine it took something like 1min. Same when I run sudo. I was
thinking this could be a hostname resolution or alike, but the machine is
checking the hostname from the hosts file first, so negative.
I could find the rootcause by running strace -p (sudo pid).
It turned out it was quering a kerberos.mit.edu server, which is
unreachable. Looking further it truned out that this is in
the /etc/krb5.conf file, which is part of the krb5-user.
However this package was removed, but the conf file was left over. I tried
to reproduce it - apt-get install and dpkg --purge /etc/krb5.conf is there.
Do you thing it is a bug or a feature? In my opinion it is a bug.

regards


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Re: apt stuck at "Reading database"

[Jape Person]

Sorry, this message was sent initially from a shared e-mail address. I'm 
using the correct address now. The primary owner of that addy is even 
older and grumpier than I am. Heh.


On 04/13/2015 11:10 AM, Curt wrote:
> On 2015-04-13, Jape Person  wrote:
>>
>> IIRC apt-listbugs or apt-listchanges (or both) don't work without the
>> deb-src entries in /etc/apt/sources.list. I think these are tools that
>
> They don't?  Is that documented somewhere?
>

Not that I can find. I remembered having to restore the deb-src lines
after someone on this list (IIRC) suggesting doing that when I lost my
ability to see changelogs for upgradable files from within the aptitude
TUI. Restoring those deb-src lines did restore the ability to see the
changelogs in aptitude. I'm pretty sure my memory on this is correct.

I'm wondering if it was a bug in aptitude.

I'll try to do some research to find out whether or not this is simply
some confabulation / conflation created solely by my tiny mind.



>> Debian users should be encouraged to use. At the least they provide a
>> bit of a heads-up to the unwary during installations and upgrades.
>
> I used apt-listbugs when I ran testing to avoid unpleasant surprises
> (you just hold off on upgrading a day or two, and the surprise usually
> goes away of its own accord).
>
> For stable I don't see the point.
>
>> But I do get your point.
>>
>
> Depends what flavor (stable, testing, experiemental) of Debian
> you're running, IMHO.
>
>


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Jessie= stable date?

[Gene Heskett]

Hello all;

ISTR Jessie was supposed to be "stable" as a debian 8 release on the 
15th.

Is that still the plan?

Thanks.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 


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Re: debian 8

[Bret Busby]

On 14/04/2015, Petter Adsen  wrote:


>
> Yes, I know how FIFO works :)
>

The reason that I explained what I meant by FIFO, is that now, in
Australia, due to the nature of working in remote locations, where
people live a thousand or so km from where they work (one of my
brothers did it even longer distance, for a few years, where he worked
in an arab country, with six weeks on, six weeks off, or six months
on, six months off, or something like that, and his home was in a
state within Australia), FIFO also means Fly In Fly Out.

Too many acronyms, too few brain cells to process them - and, too many
acronyms that are the same, that represent different expansions.


-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992




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Re: Book questions

[Curt]

On 2015-04-13, Reco  wrote:
>
> *ANSI* C - yes. For instance, gcc has this wonderful '-ansi' switch.
> It's even possible to choose the exact version of ANSI C standard (i.e.
> -std=c99).
> *K&R* C - no. At least, gcc-4.7 has no switch for this that I'm
> aware of.
>

-traditional ?

But incompatibilities.

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.2/gcc/Incompatibilities.html


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Re: Book questions

[Petter Adsen]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 20:21:49 +0300
Reco  wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 12:36:28AM +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> > The question is, what is the nature of the understanding that you
> > want of Linux? Is it the interaction between the layers, for
> > example, the HAL and the higher layers; is it the multitasking; is
> > it understanding administration (such as, do not do one of the
> > whoopsies - using "chmod .", as one (other) student did, when I was
> > learning UNIX), is it scripting and shell processing, or, is it the
> > "design and implementation" of the operating system, and, in that,
> > does what you want, include comparative design and implementation
> > of operating systems?
> 
> Let's see as I didn't have OS design in mind. Something like:
> 
> Exit codes and their value in real life.
> Strings handling, memory allocation.
> Process control and daemonisation (sp?).
> Signal handling.
> Inter-process communication (sockets, pipes).
> IP protocol use and abuse.
> Shared memory.
> Threads.
> Libraries and their usage.

Just to pipe in here, these are among the things that I want an
understanding of - especially numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 and 9. With extra
focus on 9 and 6b :) Also things like communication between processes
and devices, file systems, etc. I want to learn how to find out why
things work the way they do, if that makes sense.

> Bonus points are granted if code can be compiled on more than one
> processor architecture. Extra bonus points for doing it in more than
> one POSIX-compatible OS.
> 
> Of course, those are basics. There's nothing in those that cannot
> be implemented in any programming language.
> 
> But then - you encounter a mis-behaving program. You use strace(1) or
> ltrace(1) and, hey, suddenly you understand what's going on without

This! I know how to use strace to get an idea of what goes wrong, but I
understand that without a basic understanding of C you can't really
make optimal use of such tools.

> even looking at the source. You can use gdb to pull out tricks deemed
> impossible by others. You can use valgrind to point out memory leaks
> or use-after-free. All that possible by the fact you've learned C, and
> you can't get more closely to OS than using C.
> 
> That does not invalidate the fact that learning C as a first
> programming language can be pretty hardcore (I was taught BASIC first,
> then Pascal), and for the complex program you'll probably want
> something else as by today's standards C has poor result/effort ratio.

I can't recall saying that C would be my first programming language. I
started writing short programs in BASIC when I was 5 or 6, and learnt
Pascal, Smalltalk and a little 6502 + 68K assembler at school. Through
the years I've also picked up a little Perl and a bit of shell by sheer
necessity.

> And please think of the children :) Teaching young ones something as
> volatile and ever-changing as Python (or, $DEITY forbid, Ruby) can be
> considered cruel and abusive :)

"Won't _somebody_ think of the _children?!" :)

My cat is walking on my keyboard now, demanding attention. Best not to
ignore him any longer. :)

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."


pgpm5Nz7PNdP9.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: debian 8

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 13 April 2015 14:00:15 Petter Adsen wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 13:04:28 -0400
>
> Gene Heskett  wrote:
> What, apart from using JavaScript (which I agree is not desirable), is
> problematic?

No x button to close is shown to iceweasel. I even tried the upper right 
corner clikcing blind, thinking some jerk had chosen to display the X in 
white like the rest of the popup.  No effect.

> > IOW, we cannot see whats at the link.
>
> I could.

What browser?  ISTR I also tried chromium with similar results.
>
> > Is there not another service that is more "friendly" to the use its
> > used for?
>
> Not that many that has Linux clients, unfortunately. I know of only
> two - Google Drive (unofficial client only, and I dislike Google), and
> CloudMe (where I haven't got any free space right now).

pastebin.ca has worked for me quite a few times in the past, but it has 
probably been a year since I last needed to use it.  I can put it on my 
own web page with just a little more effort.  Biggest problem with that 
is my innate laziness, I don't have an automatic expirey for styff like 
that. IOW I forget its there. Goes with the years on the wet ram (but 
still in the 2 digit range) I guess. ;-)

> Anyway, it's all academic now, as I've emailed the pdf to Bret.

Which sounds like an overll win. :)

> Petter

Cheers Petter, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 


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Re: Excluding a directory from tar

[Petter Adsen]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 12:12:51 -0500
David Wright  wrote:

> Quoting Petter Adsen (pet...@synth.no):
> > I've been trying to make a tarball of my home directory, but I want
> > to exclude ~/.cache. First I tried '--exclude="~/.cache", but it
> > didn't work. Neither did '--exclude="~/.cache/*".
> > 
> > I got it working by creating an empty file in ~/.cache and using the
> > filename as an argument to "--exclude-tag-under", but what was I
> > doing wrong when trying to use "--exclude"?
> 
> I didn't know tar did that. I thought most people use find to generate
> the filenames for tar to act on.
> 
> Then you'd be using a command something like
> 
> find -xdev -path './cache' -prune -o -print | tar ...
> 
> and the other advantage of this method is that you pipe it into less
> until you get the files you want, then only then substitute tar.
> 
> Have fun reading man find, though!

petter@monster:~$ man tar | wc -l
540
petter@monster:~$ man find | wc -l
1572

:-)

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."


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Re: apt stuck at "Reading database"

[James P. Wallen]

On 04/13/2015 11:10 AM, Curt wrote:

On 2015-04-13, Jape Person  wrote:


IIRC apt-listbugs or apt-listchanges (or both) don't work without the
deb-src entries in /etc/apt/sources.list. I think these are tools that


They don't?  Is that documented somewhere?



Not that I can find. I remembered having to restore the deb-src lines 
after someone on this list (IIRC) suggesting doing that when I lost my 
ability to see changelogs for upgradable files from within the aptitude 
TUI. Restoring those deb-src lines did restore the ability to see the 
changelogs in aptitude. I'm pretty sure my memory on this is correct.


I'm wondering if it was a bug in aptitude.

I'll try to do some research to find out whether or not this is simply 
some confabulation / conflation created solely by my tiny mind.


;-)


Debian users should be encouraged to use. At the least they provide a
bit of a heads-up to the unwary during installations and upgrades.


I used apt-listbugs when I ran testing to avoid unpleasant surprises
(you just hold off on upgrading a day or two, and the surprise usually
goes away of its own accord).

For stable I don't see the point.


But I do get your point.



Depends what flavor (stable, testing, experiemental) of Debian
you're running, IMHO.





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Re: Book questions

[Bret Busby]

On 14/04/2015, Petter Adsen  wrote:



> My cat is walking on my keyboard now, demanding attention. Best not to
> ignore him any longer. :)
>

Can he program?

Cats are smart creatures.

"Dogs have masters - cats have staff"
:)

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992




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Re: Debian 7 and external monitors and graphics adaptors

[Bob Bernstein]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015, Bret Busby wrote:

both were running Debian 7, as the last operating 
system, before the hardware crashes.


Aha! There it is at last! The Smoking Gun!

Grassy Knoll, anyone?

nb. http://www.google.com/search?q=grassy%20knoll


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Fw: Jessie= stable date?

[Linux-Fan]

Sorry for not posting this to the list in the first place :(
I just sent it again for the record.

Linux-Fan

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 21:19:31 +0200
From: Linux-Fan 
To: Gene Heskett 
Subject: Re: Jessie= stable date?

[Mon, 13 Apr 2015 14:22:12 -0400] Gene Heskett 
wrote:
> Hello all;
> 
> ISTR Jessie was supposed to be "stable" as a debian 8 release on the 
> 15th.
> 
> Is that still the plan?

I thought it was the 25th, cf.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/03/msg00016.html

HTH
Linux-Fan


-- 
http://masysma.lima-city.de/


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Re: reading an empty directory after reboot is very slow

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015, at 13:48, Gene Heskett wrote:
> I wonder if our "sort" utilities also do that file shrink?

No.  It is something the VFS (generic filesystem layer inside the kernel) or 
filesystem itself would have to do, due to atomicity requirements.

> Unrelated of course, but of all the directory sorters I have written for 
> a much smaller OS, one whose "dir" command presents you with an unsorted 
> listing, we have dsort for cli use, and gsort for use when called by a 
> gui button.  Both of these basically do a bubble sort on the directory, 
> which in this examnple case is itself a file, with the output of the 
> sort being re-written as the sorted list, with all the deleted entries 
> removed, and the directory file itself truncated at the end of the last 
> valid entry.  Otherwise, this file systems directories can grow quite 
> large even if it does reuse the data slot occupied by a deleted file for 
> a new file entry to conserve space.

Typical way to do this in Unix (danger: NOT atomic), is to create a new dir, 
move files to it in the order you want the inodes created, then 
fsync+fdatasync, rmdir old, mv new old.  Do that using separate filesystems ofr 
new and old, and you will also defragment the files.

I don't think XFS's defrag utility does it, because it operates at a file/inode 
level an inode/file at a time.  e2fsck might, though, as it does optimize inode 
hashing in directories.  I have no idea about e4defrag.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique de Moraes Holschuh 


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Jessie: No VGA signal after gdm3 login

[Thomas H. George]

Just returned from vacation, booted up.

After gdm3 login screen goes blank, then No VGA Signal
Installed xdm. Same result
Ran apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade
Repeated xdm login. Same result

Before vacation login opened Gnome and I ran several programs with no
problems.

Even now consoles F1 through F6 work normally and I can run command line
programs.

What could have happened? Found nothing about this in April
lists.debian.org archives.

Tom


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Re: Jessie= stable date?

[Sven Joachim]

On 2015-04-13 20:22 +0200, Gene Heskett wrote:

> ISTR Jessie was supposed to be "stable" as a debian 8 release on the 
> 15th.

No, the only announce I noticed[1] mentions the 25th.

> Is that still the plan?

I haven't heard otherwise.

Cheers,
   Sven


1. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/03/msg00016.html


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Re: Excluding a directory from tar

[David Wright]

Quoting Petter Adsen (pet...@synth.no):
> On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 12:12:51 -0500
> David Wright  wrote:
> > Have fun reading man find, though!
> 
> petter@monster:~$ man tar | wc -l
> 540
> petter@monster:~$ man find | wc -l
> 1572
> 
> :-)

Mea culpa. But, in my defence, I think I used tar once or twice in
the second millennium, but never knowingly since. Normally I would
have had cpio on the end of that pipe, not tar.

But, to make a serious point, knowing how to use find is a
valuable skill as plenty of software doesn't have the options
that tar now has.

Cheers,
David.


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Re: debian 8

[Lisi Reisz]

On Monday 13 April 2015 19:00:15 Petter Adsen wrote:
> I was honestly just trying to help the OP in a way that was easy for us
> both, and since my mother manages to download the files I put on
> Dropbox for her, I just assumed it would be an acceptable solution.

It seemed to me to be a generous solution.

Lisi


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Re: reading an empty directory after reboot is very slow

[David Wright]

Quoting Vincent Lefevre (vinc...@vinc17.net):
> Thanks! I didn't know that (I thought that the file system would
> automatically "optimize" directories when files are removed, so
> I've never looked closely at their size). Indeed:
> 
> ypig:~/eftests> ls -ld tmp
> drwxr-xr-x 2 vlefevre vlefevre 29655040 2015-04-13 15:25:55 tmp/

That's staggering. My /var/lib/dpkg/info has ~8900 files and occupies
462848 bytes. So that would be over ½million files in your case.
Does eftests stand for "excessive files tests"!

Cheers,
David.


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Re: debian 8

[Celejar]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 20:00:15 +0200
Petter Adsen  wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 13:04:28 -0400
> Gene Heskett  wrote:

> > Is there not another service that is more "friendly" to the use its
> > used for?
> 
> Not that many that has Linux clients, unfortunately. I know of only two
> - Google Drive (unofficial client only, and I dislike Google), and
> CloudMe (where I haven't got any free space right now).

As I've noted on another recent thread, some cloud providers (Yandex,
Box) offer WebDAV access, which (potentially) makes linux access
relatively straightforward via something like davfs2.

Celejar


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Re: Book questions

[Reco]

 Hi.

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 06:32:30PM +, Curt wrote:
> On 2015-04-13, Reco  wrote:
> >
> > *ANSI* C - yes. For instance, gcc has this wonderful '-ansi' switch.
> > It's even possible to choose the exact version of ANSI C standard (i.e.
> > -std=c99).
> > *K&R* C - no. At least, gcc-4.7 has no switch for this that I'm
> > aware of.
> >
> 
> -traditional ?
> 
> But incompatibilities.
> 
> https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.2/gcc/Incompatibilities.html

There's a small matter with it:

$ gcc -traditional 1.c
gcc-4.7.real: error: GNU C no longer supports -traditional without -E

And 'gcc -E' basically equals to 'cpp', i.e. pre-processing c code, not
compilation.

Sure, I can get a lot of free time, and build gcc-3 with gcc-4.7, but
surely that's not something one can expect from the beginner :)

Reco


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Re: reading an empty directory after reboot is very slow

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 13 April 2015 16:08:44 Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2015, at 13:48, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > I wonder if our "sort" utilities also do that file shrink?
>
> No.  It is something the VFS (generic filesystem layer inside the
> kernel) or filesystem itself would have to do, due to atomicity
> requirements.
>
> > Unrelated of course, but of all the directory sorters I have written
> > for a much smaller OS, one whose "dir" command presents you with an
> > unsorted listing, we have dsort for cli use, and gsort for use when
> > called by a gui button.  Both of these basically do a bubble sort on
> > the directory, which in this examnple case is itself a file, with
> > the output of the sort being re-written as the sorted list, with all
> > the deleted entries removed, and the directory file itself truncated
> > at the end of the last valid entry.  Otherwise, this file systems
> > directories can grow quite large even if it does reuse the data slot
> > occupied by a deleted file for a new file entry to conserve space.
>
> Typical way to do this in Unix (danger: NOT atomic), is to create a
> new dir, move files to it in the order you want the inodes created,
> then fsync+fdatasync, rmdir old, mv new old.  Do that using separate
> filesystems ofr new and old, and you will also defragment the files.
>
> I don't think XFS's defrag utility does it, because it operates at a
> file/inode level an inode/file at a time.  e2fsck might, though, as it
> does optimize inode hashing in directories.  I have no idea about
> e4defrag.

I was semi-assuming that was the case for Linux, since its a decade newer 
than the Microware OS9 I was referrencing.

Thank you for the clarification.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 


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Re: Book questions

[Reco]

 Hi.

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 02:16:40AM +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> On 14/04/2015, Reco  wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 12:36:28AM +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> >> On 13/04/2015, Reco  wrote:
> >>
> >> 
> >>
> >> >Learning C is simple and
> >> > fun. Just read classic K&R treatise, do all the examples. Did so back
> >> > in
> >> > high school, and no brain was damaged in the process :)
> >> > The only problem today is to get a C compiler that understands K&R C.
> >> >
> >>
> >> I have not programmed in "C" for about 20-25 years, now, but, from
> >> memory, with compilers, like "C" compilers, don't they have a switch
> >> that can be set,  so that they accept only ANSI code, such as ANSI
> >> "C"?
> >
> > *ANSI* C - yes. For instance, gcc has this wonderful '-ansi' switch.
> > It's even possible to choose the exact version of ANSI C standard (i.e.
> > -std=c99).
> > *K&R* C - no. At least, gcc-4.7 has no switch for this that I'm
> > aware of.
> >
> 
> Okay - this is where the detail of the Kernighan & Ritchie book, is required.
> 
> You see, when I searched for "C" books, at amazon, I found at
> http://www.amazon.com/The-Programming-Language-Brian-Kernighan/dp/8120305965/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=02E2S6076Y4MYDCXP9RE
> 
>
> 
> So, the second edition, published in 1988, included ANSI "C", and, the
> picture of the from cover of the book, has a big stamp on it; "ANSI
> C".

That's something that I didn't know. And that means that back in 1994
they gave me first edition of the book :) Not that it stopped me from
reading it or trying the things they put in there.


> So, it really depends on, if the original poster obtains, or, obtains
> access to, a copy of the text "The C Programming Language" by
> Kernighan and Ritchie, whether he gets a copy that is the second
> edition (1988) or later.
> 
> If he gets a copy that is the second edition (1988), or later, then it
> should be ANSI "C".

The only suspicious thing is - the oldest ANSI C standard that I'm aware
of is C89. Sure, K&R could use a draft of ANSI C standard in the second
edtition, but still...


> When I was learning "C", I found the (then available) Sam's Waite
> Group "C" Bible to be a brilliant reference manual, as it was a
> brilliant language reference manual.
> 
> But, a reference manual, and, a teaching course, are two different things.

Sure. That's why I'd like to add this:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025108.do

The book assumes that you know the basics, and focuses on the ways of
using them right way (makefiles, pkg-config, that stuff). Good reading.


Reco


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Re: debian 8

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 13 April 2015 16:56:05 Celejar wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 20:00:15 +0200
>
> Petter Adsen  wrote:
> > On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 13:04:28 -0400
> >
> > Gene Heskett  wrote:
> > > Is there not another service that is more "friendly" to the use
> > > its used for?
> >
> > Not that many that has Linux clients, unfortunately. I know of only
> > two - Google Drive (unofficial client only, and I dislike Google),
> > and CloudMe (where I haven't got any free space right now).
>
> As I've noted on another recent thread, some cloud providers (Yandex,
> Box) offer WebDAV access, which (potentially) makes linux access
> relatively straightforward via something like davfs2.
>
> Celejar

I must be showing my age then, what in tuncket is davfs2?

Thanks.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 


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Re: Book questions

[David Wright]

Quoting Petter Adsen (pet...@synth.no):
> On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 20:21:49 +0300
> Reco  wrote:
> > Let's see as I didn't have OS design in mind. Something like:
> > 
> > Exit codes and their value in real life.
> > Strings handling, memory allocation.
> > Process control and daemonisation (sp?).
> > Signal handling.
> > Inter-process communication (sockets, pipes).
> > IP protocol use and abuse.
> > Shared memory.
> > Threads.
> > Libraries and their usage.
> 
> Just to pipe in here, these are among the things that I want an
> understanding of - especially numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 and 9. With extra
> focus on 9 and 6b :) Also things like communication between processes
> and devices, file systems, etc. I want to learn how to find out why
> things work the way they do, if that makes sense.

If you want to understand the basics, there is any number of tutorials
on the web. If you want to play with them, then pick a language and go
to a web page like https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html
and write some toy programs. Most of these facilities have wrappers
that save you having to write C code to create, say, a couple of
sockets that talk to each other. If you try this in C and it doesn't
work, it might take you half a day to decide whether you've
misunderstood the socket concept or just made a programming error.

As Reco said,

> > [...], and for the complex program you'll probably want
> > something else as by today's standards C has poor result/effort ratio.

Cheers,
David.


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Re: Book questions

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 13 April 2015 17:22:34 Reco wrote:
>  Hi.
>
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 02:16:40AM +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> > On 14/04/2015, Reco  wrote:
> > > On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 12:36:28AM +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> > >> On 13/04/2015, Reco  wrote:
> > >>
> > >> 
> > >>
> > >> >Learning C is simple and
> > >> > fun. Just read classic K&R treatise, do all the examples. Did
> > >> > so back in
> > >> > high school, and no brain was damaged in the process :)
> > >> > The only problem today is to get a C compiler that understands
> > >> > K&R C.
> > >>
> > >> I have not programmed in "C" for about 20-25 years, now, but,
> > >> from memory, with compilers, like "C" compilers, don't they have
> > >> a switch that can be set,  so that they accept only ANSI code,
> > >> such as ANSI "C"?
> > >
> > > *ANSI* C - yes. For instance, gcc has this wonderful '-ansi'
> > > switch. It's even possible to choose the exact version of ANSI C
> > > standard (i.e. -std=c99).
> > > *K&R* C - no. At least, gcc-4.7 has no switch for this that I'm
> > > aware of.
> >
> > Okay - this is where the detail of the Kernighan & Ritchie book, is
> > required.
> >
> > You see, when I searched for "C" books, at amazon, I found at
> > http://www.amazon.com/The-Programming-Language-Brian-Kernighan/dp/81
> >20305965/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=02E2S6076Y4MYDCXP9RE
> >
> >
> >
> > So, the second edition, published in 1988, included ANSI "C", and,
> > the picture of the from cover of the book, has a big stamp on it;
> > "ANSI C".
>
> That's something that I didn't know. And that means that back in 1994
> they gave me first edition of the book :) Not that it stopped me from
> reading it or trying the things they put in there.
>
> > So, it really depends on, if the original poster obtains, or,
> > obtains access to, a copy of the text "The C Programming Language"
> > by Kernighan and Ritchie, whether he gets a copy that is the second
> > edition (1988) or later.
> >
> > If he gets a copy that is the second edition (1988), or later, then
> > it should be ANSI "C".
>
> The only suspicious thing is - the oldest ANSI C standard that I'm
> aware of is C89. Sure, K&R could use a draft of ANSI C standard in the
> second edtition, but still...

That depends on the K&R version you have. I have both and they are in 
fact 95% alike.  Blue & white cover, good printing job = 1st edition.

Blue, white and red on the cover and it's ed 2, the ANSI C89 version.  It 
was not finalized and published till about 92 or so.  Its also a lousy 
print job, the copy I have was assembled, bound, and sold when the 
offset plates that printed it were, in the parlance of the offset 
printing business I am also familiar with, "blind" so large swathes of 
it have to be read under a good light with a magnifying glass.

> > When I was learning "C", I found the (then available) Sam's Waite
> > Group "C" Bible to be a brilliant reference manual, as it was a
> > brilliant language reference manual.
> >
> > But, a reference manual, and, a teaching course, are two different
> > things.
>
> Sure. That's why I'd like to add this:
>
> http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025108.do
>
> The book assumes that you know the basics, and focuses on the ways of
> using them right way (makefiles, pkg-config, that stuff). Good
> reading.
>
>
> Reco

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 


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Re: debian 8

[David Wright]

Quoting Gene Heskett (ghesk...@wdtv.com):
> On Monday 13 April 2015 16:56:05 Celejar wrote:
> > As I've noted on another recent thread, some cloud providers (Yandex,
> > Box) offer WebDAV access, which (potentially) makes linux access
> > relatively straightforward via something like davfs2.
> 
> I must be showing my age then, what in tuncket is davfs2?

Is google down?

Cheers,
David.


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Re: debian 8

[Celejar]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 17:26:12 -0400
Gene Heskett  wrote:

> On Monday 13 April 2015 16:56:05 Celejar wrote:

...

> > As I've noted on another recent thread, some cloud providers (Yandex,
> > Box) offer WebDAV access, which (potentially) makes linux access
> > relatively straightforward via something like davfs2.
> >
> > Celejar
> 
> I must be showing my age then, what in tuncket is davfs2?

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/davfs2

> Thanks.

Celejar


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Re: debian 8

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 13 April 2015 17:41:33 David Wright wrote:
> Quoting Gene Heskett (ghesk...@wdtv.com):
> > On Monday 13 April 2015 16:56:05 Celejar wrote:
> > > As I've noted on another recent thread, some cloud providers
> > > (Yandex, Box) offer WebDAV access, which (potentially) makes linux
> > > access relatively straightforward via something like davfs2.
> >
> > I must be showing my age then, what in tuncket is davfs2?
>
> Is google down?
>
Chuckle, and no. I just figured that the best person to ask about it was 
the one familiar enough with it to suggest its use. :)

> Cheers,
> David.
Thanks.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 


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Re: Book questions

[Nate Bargmann]

* On 2015 13 Apr 13:38 -0500, Petter Adsen wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 20:21:49 +0300
> Reco  wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 12:36:28AM +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> > > The question is, what is the nature of the understanding that you
> > > want of Linux? Is it the interaction between the layers, for
> > > example, the HAL and the higher layers; is it the multitasking; is
> > > it understanding administration (such as, do not do one of the
> > > whoopsies - using "chmod .", as one (other) student did, when I was
> > > learning UNIX), is it scripting and shell processing, or, is it the
> > > "design and implementation" of the operating system, and, in that,
> > > does what you want, include comparative design and implementation
> > > of operating systems?
> > 
> > Let's see as I didn't have OS design in mind. Something like:
> > 
> > Exit codes and their value in real life.
> > Strings handling, memory allocation.
> > Process control and daemonisation (sp?).
> > Signal handling.
> > Inter-process communication (sockets, pipes).
> > IP protocol use and abuse.
> > Shared memory.
> > Threads.
> > Libraries and their usage.
> 
> Just to pipe in here, these are among the things that I want an
> understanding of - especially numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 and 9. With extra
> focus on 9 and 6b :) Also things like communication between processes
> and devices, file systems, etc. I want to learn how to find out why
> things work the way they do, if that makes sense.

Then you may want to look at The Linux Programming Interface:

http://man7.org/tlpi/

It is not a volume for the faint of heart, but seems quite complete.  In
fact, I received notification some time back that a new printing was
available for download (I have both the ebook/PDF and hard copy).  Nice
touch, thought I.

- Nate

-- 

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."

Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more: http://www.n0nb.us


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Re: reading an empty directory after reboot is very slow

[Bob Proulx]

Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> Loïc Grenié wrote:
> > Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > > The problem is that this operation is (always?) very slow: something
> > > like 100 seconds (1 minute and 40 seconds). It has been reproducible
> > > for several months. The logs show nothing during this operation.
> > >
> > > Any idea?

Of course immediately after a reboot the file system buffer cache is
completely clean.  You can avoid the reboot and recreate this
situation by this:

  # echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

See this for the documentation:

  https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt

That would certainly be less disruptive to recreate the situation than
rebooting the entire system.

> > Maybe the directory is very large (even though its empty). Try
> > 
> > ls -ld tmp.
> > 
> >  and see if the file "tmp" is large.
> 
> Thanks! I didn't know that (I thought that the file system would
> automatically "optimize" directories when files are removed, so
> I've never looked closely at their size). Indeed:
> 
> ypig:~/eftests> ls -ld tmp
> drwxr-xr-x 2 vlefevre vlefevre 29655040 2015-04-13 15:25:55 tmp/

What type of file system is it?  Does it have dir_index?  Both ext3
and ext4 support it.  Others are similar.

  # tune2fs -l /dev/mapper/v1-var | grep --color Filesystem.features
  Filesystem features:  has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index 
filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file

Without dir_index an ext filesystem with large directories is slow due
to the linear nature of directories.  But with dir_index it should be
using a B-tree data structure and should be much faster.  This can be
turned off for a migration if it is off.

  tune2fs -O dir_index /dev/sda5

But existing directories are not converted.  Only new directories are
converted.  So if you have an older machine that has been upgraded and
upgraded and upgraded then all of the existing directories will still
be the previous linear data structure.  Only new directories get the
tree data structure.  One would need to recreate directories in order
to migrate from the old to the new.  Very few directories really need
it though so for the most part that is okay.  It is only directories
such as /tmp that sporadically might have surged large that really
benefit from a manual recreation conversion in order to have B-trees
turned on for a migration to dir_index.

Bob


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Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[Patrick Bartek]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015, David Wright wrote:

> [I'm hoping this isn't a duplicate post, but my first
> attempt was rejected by bendel.debian.org as forged.]
> 
> Quoting Patrick Bartek (nemomm...@gmail.com):
> > On Sun, 12 Apr 2015, bri...@aracnet.com wrote:
> > > i'll second the use of openbox.  i use it with fbpanel.
> > >
> > > i too believe that gnome just pulls in way too much "stuff".
> > >
> > > the most inconvenient thing about not using gnome is not having a
> way
> > > to handle USS mass storage devices.
> >
> > I wrote a generic udev rule for that.  Of course, there are also
> > mounting utilities that do the same thing.  But I opted for the
> > light-on-resources rule instead.
> 
> Care to share it?

Well, sort of . . .   The rule I'm running now is too specific to my
system to be of general use, but below is what I started with.  Found it
while researching how to write rules.  Don't have the author's name.
Sorry.

The rule mounts and unmounts flash drives -- just plug and unplug -- and
cards (any type using an external card or multi-card reader.  The
caveat is: you must plug the card in first, then plug the reader in.
Unmount by unplugging reader with the card still in it, then remove the
card. Doesn't work with internal multi-card readers.  Probably not with
single internal readers either.  For that you need a daemon like
udisks-daemon set to poll each card slot of the reader.  

Good luck.

B

 >8 

# /etc/udev/rules.d/10-my-media-automount.rules
 

# start at sdb to ignore the system hard drive
KERNEL!="sd[b-z]*", GOTO="my_media_automount_end"
ACTION=="add", PROGRAM!="/sbin/blkid %N", GOTO="my_media_automount_end"

# import some useful filesystem info as variables
IMPORT{program}="/sbin/blkid -o udev -p %N"
 
# get the label if present, otherwise assign one based on device/partition
ENV{ID_FS_LABEL}!="", ENV{dir_name}="%E{ID_FS_LABEL}"
ENV{ID_FS_LABEL}=="", ENV{dir_name}="usbhd-%k"
 
# create the dir in /media and symlink it to /mnt
ACTION=="add", RUN+="/bin/mkdir -p '/media/%E{dir_name}'"

# create a symbolic link to /media/{usb_folder} on desktop
ACTION=="add", RUN+="/bin/ln -s '/media/%E{dir_name}' 
'/home/aardvark/Desktop/%E{dir_name}'"
 
# global mount options
ACTION=="add", ENV{mount_options}="relatime"

# filesystem-specific mount options (777/666 dir/file perms for ntfs/vfat)
ACTION=="add", ENV{ID_FS_TYPE}=="vfat|ntfs", 
ENV{mount_options}="$env{mount_options},gid=100,dmask=000,fmask=111,utf8"
 

# automount ntfs filesystems using ntfs-3g driver
ACTION=="add", ENV{ID_FS_TYPE}=="ntfs", RUN+="/bin/mount -t ntfs-3g -o 
%E{mount_options} /dev/%k '/media/%E{dir_name}'"

# automount all other filesystems
ACTION=="add", ENV{ID_FS_TYPE}!="ntfs", RUN+="/bin/mount -t auto -o 
%E{mount_options} /dev/%k '/media/%E{dir_name}'"
 
# remove the symbolic link to ~/{usb_folder}
ACTION=="remove", RUN+="/bin/rm -f '/home/aardvark/Desktop/%E{dir_name}'"

# clean up after device removal
ACTION=="remove", ENV{dir_name}!="", RUN+="/bin/umount -l 
'/media/%E{dir_name}'", RUN+="/bin/rmdir '/media/%E{dir_name}'"
 
# exit
LABEL="my_media_automount_end"

#Note: Edit line 17 and 30 to reflect your Desktop path. In other words,
# change /home/aardvark/Desktop to/home/{your_user_name}/Desktop. The reason
# that I didn’t use a relative path is because there is a myth that such 
configs do not go well with relative paths.

== >8 =

Here's a work-in-progress showing how polling works that fell by the
wayside. It will mount a CD or DVD, but not unmount it.  Hadn't gotten
to the unmounting part yet.

== >8 

# /etc/udev/rules.d/12-trial-dvd-automount.rules

# udisks-daemon must be running and polling /dev/sr0 for this to work
 

# Consider only internal DVD sr0
KERNEL!="sr0", GOTO="end"
#ACTION=="add", PROGRAM!="/sbin/blkid %N", GOTO="end"

# import some useful filesystem info as variables
IMPORT{program}="/sbin/blkid -o udev -p %N"
 
# Check FS type, get the label if present, otherwise assign one
ENV{ID_FS_TYPE}!="iso9660", GOTO="end"
ENV{ID_FS_LABEL}!="", ENV{dir_name}="%E{ID_FS_LABEL}"
ENV{ID_FS_LABEL}=="", ENV{dir_name}="optical-%k"
 
# create the dir in /media
#ACTION=="add"
RUN+="/bin/mkdir -p '/media/%E{dir_name}'"

# Mount CD/DVD
RUN+="/bin/mount -t iso9660 /dev/%k '/media/%E{dir_name}'"

# Exit Rule
LABEL="end"

== >8 ===


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Re: debian 8

[Ric Moore]

On 04/13/2015 02:00 PM, Petter Adsen wrote:

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 13:04:28 -0400
Gene Heskett  wrote:




I just copied that link myself and opened it in Firefox. A "sign in or
log on" box was displayed, which I closed without doing either (click
on the "X"), and then got a page containing the name of the file with a
button marked "Download". I clicked the button, and got a menu with the
choices "direct download", and "download to my Dropbox". Clicking the
first downloaded the pdf in the normal fashion.

What, apart from using JavaScript (which I agree is not desirable), is
problematic?


IOW, we cannot see whats at the link.


I could.


Is there not another service that is more "friendly" to the use its
used for?


Gene, it worked for me as mentioned. So, now I have a copy of a user 
manual I'll never use. Think of all the pages that pop up some facebook 
create an account thing. Click 'em off. Hit "Download". Petter did a 
good thing.



Not that many that has Linux clients, unfortunately. I know of only two
- Google Drive (unofficial client only, and I dislike Google), and
CloudMe (where I haven't got any free space right now).

I could have posted the original link, but since I had to download a
zip and unpack it to see if the manual contained any information on
removing the battery in the first place, I just posted the link to
the pdf itself as that seemed simpler.

I was honestly just trying to help the OP in a way that was easy for us
both, and since my mother manages to download the files I put on
Dropbox for her, I just assumed it would be an acceptable solution.


that would be between you and Bret. The rest of us seem to be kicking 
your tires and complaining about the size.



Anyway, it's all academic now, as I've emailed the pdf to Bret.


Worked for me. Ric


--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html


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Re: WAS Re: debian 8 NOW game keyboard config

[Ric Moore]

On 04/12/2015 10:33 PM, Ric Moore wrote:

On 04/11/2015 04:31 PM, Reco wrote:

  Hi.

On Sat, 11 Apr 2015 16:00:11 -0400
Ric Moore  wrote:


On 04/11/2015 03:05 PM, Reco wrote:

dpkg-reconfigure -plow keyboard-configuration


ric@iam:~$ sudo su -
[sudo] password for ric:
root@iam:~# dpkg-reconfigure -plow keyboard-configuration
update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported;
falling back to defaults
update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported;
falling back to defaults
root@iam:~#

Err... does that mean nothing happened?


Yes and no. Yes, because dpkg-reconfigure did not ask you any questions
(and with priority=low it should ask you at least some).
No, because debconf was run.

Unless you provide an output of 'strace -f dpkg-reconfigure -plow
keyboard-configuration' - that will remain a mystery.



Is there a single file tucked  away someplace with the keyboard layout?
Using XFCE desktop on Jessie with systemd enabled.


/etc/default/keyboard should have it all. Unless, of course, you have:

- some 'accessibility options' enabled (meaning - some application
'helpfully' stealing your Shift, Ctrl or Alt keypresses)
- overridden keyboard layout switch by means of XFCE
(xfce4-xkb-plugin)
- binded Ctrl keypresses for some hotkey (gtk-can-change-accels)
- using ibus (or some other Input Method™)
- used some systemd helper to override /etc/default/keyboard (localectl)

Basically, the more software you have installed - the more
possibilities you have the things to go haywire.



Here's what happened:

I was playing warzone2100 and got finger fumbled setting a group of
trucks to group 5, (using ctrl 5).


So, long story short - you have misbehaving Ctrl key (possibly others
too) in any SDL1 application. Took 5 minutes (and several roundtrips
from their git to their wiki) to figure the dependencies of this
'warzone2100', and did I mention how I hate it when upstream tries their
best to hide dependencies?

Try replacing xfwm4 (aka stock XFCE4 window manager) with something
else, say, openbox. See how it goes then.

I did just that per your suggestion. Warzone2100 STILL does it. But, if
I boot Ubuntu on another drive on the same machine, no problem. So, I
dinked something up pecurliar to Debian/XCFE. Again, all three versions
of Warzone I jhave installed each has it's own dot config directory.
Here's the keyboard file:
-
ric@iam:/etc/default$ more keyboard
# KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE

# Consult the keyboard(5) manual page.

XKBMODEL="pc104"
XKBLAYOUT="us"
XKBVARIANT=""
XKBOPTIONS="terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"

BACKSPACE="guess"
ric@iam:/etc/default$
--
Nothing strange there.

AH HA!!

I ran "fcitx-config-gtk3" and under the "Global Config" and "Hotkey" 
tabs, I found "Saving All Config and Input History" set to control+5. 
So, I changed it to ctrl+alt+5" and everything is all peachy. I blew off 
most of this evening to find that one. I have no clue what my fingers 
did to set it like that. I don't even want to know. It's fixed!

Thanks to all who tried to help. Ric

--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html


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Re: Is gnome-core *really* the gnome minimal install?

[Seeker]

On 4/13/2015 4:59 AM, Floris wrote:


and I agree that the sentence "You have to install all end-user 
applications later" is incorrect.
Even Iceweasel is a dependency of gnome-core. I didn't know that 
Mozilla is a part of gnome.


Floris


Epiphany is the Gnome web browser, apparently the Gnome devs just want 
you to call it 'web' now.:-\


https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web

Maybe the Debian devs didn't think people were drinking enough kool-aid 
for that, so opted for

Fire Iceweasel instead. :-)

Later, Seeker

Re: debian 8

[David Wright]

Quoting Ric Moore (wayward4...@gmail.com):
> Gene, didja notice this running the command line
> ric@iam:~$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
> [sudo] password for ric:
> update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported;
> falling back to defaults
> update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported;
> falling back to defaults
> ric@iam:~$
> 
> I am assuming that cryptic message means nothing was changed?
> This is happening to me running Jessie. Is this a bug? :( Ric

These messages don't mean that nothing has changed. One sees them
frequently when packages are upgraded and run their postinst scripts.

wheezy's man update-rc.d has

   update-rc.d  [-n] name start|stop NN runlevel [runlevel]...  .  
start|stop NN runlevel [runlevel]...  . ...

but jessie's man update-rc.d doesn't.

Many postinst scripts (about a dozen here) have lines like

if [ -x "/etc/init.d/avahi-daemon" ]; then
update-rc.d avahi-daemon start 14 2 3 4 5 . stop 86 0 1 6 . >/dev/null

which makes   sub cmp_args_with_defaults   in update-rc.d
emit these lines.

I haven't read the script in detail but I'm guessing it's something to
do with the move to parallel execution of init scripts.

Cheers,
David.


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no bluetooth audio in jessie

[Juha Heinanen]

A few days ago, I upgraded my laptop from wheezy to jessie.  After that
I noticed that audio to my bluetooth speaker didn't work anymore.  I had
been using alsa audio and had a bluetooth type entry in my .asoundrc for
my speaker.

After a bit of digging it turned out that I had lost bluetooth audio,
because bluez-alsa package does not exist in jessie.  If I understood
correctly, the reason is that bluez version 5 does not support alsa
anymore.

So I decided to try if my bluetooth speaker would work in jessies with
pulseaudio.  Unfortunately that was not the case.  I got an error
message:

Apr 12 12:22:02 lohi pulseaudio[6318]: org.bluez.Manager.GetProperties()
failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method "GetProperties"
with signature "" on interface "org.bluez.Manager" doesn't exist

After a bit more digging, i found this thread that went way above my
understanding:

https://github.com/ev3dev/ev3dev/issues/198

Long story short:  it would be nice if bluetooth audio would "just work"
in jessie like it did in lenny and wheezy for years.

-- Juha


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Re: debian 8

[Petter Adsen]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 17:26:12 -0400
Gene Heskett  wrote:

> On Monday 13 April 2015 16:56:05 Celejar wrote:
> > On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 20:00:15 +0200
> >
> > Petter Adsen  wrote:
> > > On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 13:04:28 -0400
> > >
> > > Gene Heskett  wrote:
> > > > Is there not another service that is more "friendly" to the use
> > > > its used for?
> > >
> > > Not that many that has Linux clients, unfortunately. I know of
> > > only two - Google Drive (unofficial client only, and I dislike
> > > Google), and CloudMe (where I haven't got any free space right
> > > now).
> >
> > As I've noted on another recent thread, some cloud providers
> > (Yandex, Box) offer WebDAV access, which (potentially) makes linux
> > access relatively straightforward via something like davfs2.
> >
> > Celejar
> 
> I must be showing my age then, what in tuncket is davfs2?

If you read this, I bet you will be able to guess what davfs2 is for ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."


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Re: Excluding a directory from tar

[Petter Adsen]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 15:36:33 -0500
David Wright  wrote:

> Quoting Petter Adsen (pet...@synth.no):
> > On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 12:12:51 -0500
> > David Wright  wrote:
> > > Have fun reading man find, though!
> > 
> > petter@monster:~$ man tar | wc -l
> > 540
> > petter@monster:~$ man find | wc -l
> > 1572
> > 
> > :-)
> 
> Mea culpa. But, in my defence, I think I used tar once or twice in
> the second millennium, but never knowingly since. Normally I would
> have had cpio on the end of that pipe, not tar.

You have nothing to defend, I was just making a joke on what man page
would be the easiest to find what I needed in. A tarball was good for
what I needed to do, and it's what I was most familiar with.

> But, to make a serious point, knowing how to use find is a
> valuable skill as plenty of software doesn't have the options
> that tar now has.

Absolutely, and I use find frequently, it's a valuable tool. I'm
especially fond of "-exec". :)

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."


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Re: Jessie: No VGA signal after gdm3 login

[Petter Adsen]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 15:42:03 -0400
"Thomas H. George"  wrote:

> Just returned from vacation, booted up.
> 
> After gdm3 login screen goes blank, then No VGA Signal
> Installed xdm. Same result
> Ran apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade
> Repeated xdm login. Same result
> 
> Before vacation login opened Gnome and I ran several programs with no
> problems.
> 
> Even now consoles F1 through F6 work normally and I can run command
> line programs.
> 
> What could have happened? Found nothing about this in April
> lists.debian.org archives.

Can you tell us what is in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and ~/.xsession-errors?

I can't tell you what might have happened, though, at least not without
starting with the contents of those two files.

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."


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Re: Fw: Jessie= stable date?

[mudongliang]

On Mon, 2015-04-13 at 22:01 +0200, Linux-Fan wrote: 
> Sorry for not posting this to the list in the first place :(
> I just sent it again for the record.
> 
> Linux-Fan
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 21:19:31 +0200
> From: Linux-Fan 
> To: Gene Heskett 
> Subject: Re: Jessie= stable date?
> 
> [Mon, 13 Apr 2015 14:22:12 -0400] Gene Heskett 
> wrote:
> > Hello all;
> > 
> > ISTR Jessie was supposed to be "stable" as a debian 8 release on the 
> > 15th.
> > 
> > Is that still the plan?
> 
> I thought it was the 25th, cf.
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/03/msg00016.html
> 
Almost half one month pasted , is there any latest news about this
data???
mudongliangabcd



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Re: reading an empty directory after reboot is very slow

[Petter Adsen]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 15:41:03 +0200
Vincent Lefevre  wrote:

> On 2015-04-13 14:45:25 +0200, Loïc Grenié wrote:
> > 2015-04-13 14:39 GMT+02:00 Vincent Lefevre :
> > > The problem is that this operation is (always?) very slow:
> > > something like 100 seconds (1 minute and 40 seconds). It has been
> > > reproducible for several months. The logs show nothing during
> > > this operation.
> > >
> > > Any idea?
> > 
> > Maybe the directory is very large (even though its empty). Try
> > 
> > ls -ld tmp.
> > 
> >  and see if the file "tmp" is large.
> 
> Thanks! I didn't know that (I thought that the file system would
> automatically "optimize" directories when files are removed, so
> I've never looked closely at their size). Indeed:
> 
> ypig:~/eftests> ls -ld tmp
> drwxr-xr-x 2 vlefevre vlefevre 29655040 2015-04-13 15:25:55 tmp/

Can someone please enlighten me as to why the entry for this directory
is so large, even though it is empty? Since it's apparently obvious to
everyone else, I would very much like to know :)

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."


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