System trashed
Ok, I just upgraded to slink, and thought everything was ok, but that was before I rebooted. My system rebooted, and started xdm (or whatever), which I don't want, and the keyboard seemed to be locked up. I could move the mouse, but couldn't attempt to log in, or even switch to another virtual terminal. How can I stop this from happening? Is this a bug, 'cos I didn't ask for xdm to be started, and, wherever I was given the choice, I chose to keep my own startup scripts, so surely xdm's bullied its way into starting. Cheers Rich
Re: My PC's internal (built-in) speaker.
When you turn on your computer, it should make a beep noise through the internal speaker as the BIOS initialises (POST). This is so you know it has started correctly, for example if your monitor fails. If you do not get any sort of sound at start up, the speaker may be broken, or disconnected. If you don't mind doing this, take the case off your computer, and check the connection between the speaker and the motherboard - there should probably be a pair of thin plastic-coated wires going via a little plastic plug to two metal prongs somewhere around the edge of the motherboard: check nothing has come loose or is broken. It is possible (unlikely?) that your Bios doesn't beep to say everything is ok on start-up, but it definitely should if something is wrong. You could try taking out your graphics card (if you haven't turned the computer off by now, do so, and take precautions against static dischage), and then re-starting your computer. If the speaker is working, there will be loads of beeps, as the bios tells you it can't find the primary video (I've heard the knew ACME bios avoids all this noise by printing an informative error message on the screen!). If your speaker isn't working, I wouldn't worry about the cost of replacing it, as the ones supplied with PC's are invariably cheap crappy ones, and you should be able to get one for around a fiver (english money). The one I have in my computer was bastardised from a broken cheap radio. Hope some of this helps, or at least makes sense. If the speaker is working physically, I can't think of any debian stuff which would use it, but if you've got dos installed, most games will use it. Rich
rich text format
Can anyone tell me the easiest way to view a rich text format under linux, preferably without installing staroffice / wp8, etc. In windows, it can be read with word, but wordview just won't load it up thanks rich
Re: rich text format
I tried man pw but I don't have an entry. What is pw, and from where do I get it? Thanks Rich
local web proxies
This might be a silly question, but what I want to do is extract information from possibly frame-based web sites, and reformat it, and offer it as a web page on the localhost. For example, I like to do a crossword on the web. Can I automatically download the grid and the clues from the web-page when I first logon (in the background), and also get the answers from the previous one, and then use the localhost server to allow filling in, without re-attatching to the remote server. Hope that makes sense. Any suggestions are welcome, including 'that's a silly idea, don't even bother trying'. Thanks in advance Rich Harran
Getting X to run as a normal user
I one of those people who've moved from windows, and use their computers as a single user. Thus I've always done everything as root. I'm finally trying to get out of this habit, but it's not so easy once everything is set up. I'm having problems getting X running properly as a normal user: it loads up, but the window manger / xterm don't appear. I exit it using <<->, and get the error: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc: /dev/null: permission denied repeated three times. I originally had no .Xsession in root or in the home of the normal user, but I sym-linked .Xsession in the user directory to .Xsession in /etc/X11, to no avail (same errors). Please help TIA Rich.
Thanks for X help and Smail help
Thanks for the help with X: changing the permissions of /dev/null worked. I hadn't had other problems with this, 'cos I'm wasn't using normal user operation very much. I've also been trying to get my mail through fetchmail + smail from a pop3 server. I type : smail -bd fetchmail -v -p POP3 -k -u username serviceprovider and then enter my password: thydjgf2 (just kidding) If I have no messages, everything is hunky-dory: fetchmail has a chat with the POP3 server, and exits cleanly. However, if I have a message, SMTP comes into play, and it all goes horribly wrong: fetchmail: POP3< +OK 2210 octets reading message 1 of 1 (2210 bytes) fetchmail: SMTP< 220-rmwh2.Trinity2 Smail-3.2.0.101 (#2 1998-Jul-16) ready at Fr i, 15 Jan 1999 15:32:34 + (GMT) fetchmail: SMTP< 220 ESMTP supported fetchmail: SMTP> EHLO rmwh2.Trinity2 fetchmail: SMTP< 250-rmwh2.Trinity2 Hello rmwh2.Trinity2 (rmwh2.Trinity2 from ad dress [131.111.193.202]), here's what we support: fetchmail: SMTP< 250-EXPN fetchmail: SMTP< 250-SIZE 102400 fetchmail: SMTP< 250-8BITMIME fetchmail: SMTP< 250-PIPELINING fetchmail: SMTP< 250 HELP fetchmail: forwarding to rmwh2.Trinity2 fetchmail: SMTP> MAIL FROM: SIZE=2210 fetchmail: SMTP< 250 debian-user@lists.debian.org ... Sender Okay fetchmail: SMTP> RCPT TO:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> fetchmail: SMTP< 550 '<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>' not matched: (ERR _100) unknown user. fetchmail: SMTP listener doesn't like recipient address [EMAIL PROTECTED]' fetchmail: SMTP> RCPT TO:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> fetchmail: SMTP< 550 '<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>' not matched: (ERR _100) unknown user. fetchmail: can't even send to calling user! fetchmail: POP3> QUIT fetchmail: POP3< On Thu, Jan 14, 1999 at 10:08:15PM +, ktb wrote: fetchmail: SMTP transaction error while fetching from mail-serv.eng.cam.ac.uk fetchmail: SMTP> QUIT fetchmail: SMTP< 221 rmwh2.Trinity2 closing connection fetchmail: normal termination, status 10 Sorry, I don't know what bit is important! Can anyone tell me how to configure smail. Alternatively, I was going to install exim (I think I read something here about it being the way forward). I've downloaded the package, but dpkg won't install it, 'cos it conficts with smail, and won't remove smail, 'cos it's needed by mailx. Thanks for any help Rich
More problems becoming a 'normal' user
I emailed a problem on the list yesterday, about getting to use X as a normal user. The problem was the permissions of /dev/null, which I changed to: crw-rw-rw- 1 root root and everything worked. However, when I restarted today, I had the same problem, and found that the permissions had changed back. I'm using X now, as I've changed them again, but how do I stop them changing back when I restart? ... Ok, I restarted again, and this time the permissions didn't change back, so I guess that's solved (bit wierd though!). Also, I want to be able to read-write automatically mounted dos drives as a normal user in group 'dos' (I read this was the right way to approach it in this list a while ago). I created the group, and added user 'rich' to it, but I can't change the group of the directory /mnt (my dos drive), to 'dos'. The drive is mounted with the line: /dev/hda1 /mntvfat defaults 0 0 To what should I change this? I've tried changing the options column to defaults,gid=dos but then the drive refuses to mount (BTW how do I view the startup messages after they've whizzed off the top of the screen?). Sorry I crammed so many silly questions into one posting. Thanks in advance Rich
still fighting for normality
I've been trying to get a dos partition mounted in group 'dos', with read-write permissions for those in this group. I found an old thread on this, and now have: /dev/hda1 /mnt vfat unmask=0002,gid=101,uid=0,showexec 0 2 in fstab, (where 101 is dos gid). However, the drive mounts with permissions: drwxr_xr_x I tried adding suid to the options (the unmounted permissions of /mnt are rwx for group), but this doesn't work, and I can't even chmod the permissions as root. If I type chmod --verbose g+w /mnt it claims to have changed the permissions, but doesn't actually. Can anyone please help me. Thanks in advance Rich
Thanks for help becoming normal and /dev/null problem
Thanks to everyone who helped me sort out the proper mounting of my dos drives so that the group 'dos' could access them rwx. As many of you suspected, it was my inability to distinguish between umask and unmask which was causing my problem (I have the same problem with umount: I read an 'n' which isn't there). For some reason, I wasn't getting an error message though? Anyway, I'm still having trouble with my /dev/null, which sometimes reverts to permissions: rwx__ when I reboot, causing X (and other) problems (it also did so after I had got X running today, possibly when I symlinked by ~/.netscape/cookies file to it). Could anyone please tell me why this happens, and how to stop it. Thanks in advance Rich
Re: CR key broken
I don't know if I'm barking up the wrong tree, but I've seen similar things over a slow telnet connection when I've eg. been editing mail messages. If this is the same thing, the problem is just with updating being slow. If there are a lot of lines to move down, this takes ages, and you don't see it at your end for a while. You could test if this is the problem by editing a test file in the way you describe, saving it, and checking to see what the saved file looks like. However, I don't know how you can avoid this problem HTH Rich Nidge Jones wrote: > At the Linux prompt all is well, nothing appears to be wrong. However start > something like JOE (editor) up and the CR doesn't insert when you hit it, > it just wraps to the next line. For example, if you are half way through a > line of text, and you hit CR, the second half of the line will drop to a new > line , and all other lines drop down to make room, yes ! > > But not here, if I do such an action, the text will just drop ontop of the > line below, making editing impossible.
fetchmail, exim, fvwm95, and netscape mail
I would like to use fetchmail to get my mail of a POP3 server, exim to sort it, and deal with the SMTP interaction with fetchmail, and Netscape mail to read it, and to compose outgoing mail with. Firstly, I got fetchmail & exim working together by using: exim -bd fetchmail -d 300 with the following ~/.fetchmailrc server mail-serv.eng.cam.ac.uk proto POP3 user pass smtphost . keep and fetchmail regularly checked for mail, and if there was any, downloaded it, and emim appended it to the file /var/spool/mail/. Also, in X and fvwm95, an envelope symbol appeared in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, which went white if there was unread mail in the file above. It also beeped on new mail arrival, and on double-click tried to launch pine (although I don't have it, so it didn't work). I then added a ~/.forward file, which saved messages in the ~/nsmail directory according to who sent them. However, this meant the envelope and beep feature in fvwm95 no longer worked. I could launch netscape mail, and its folders had changed appropriately, but it was confused by this, and didn't realise I had new mail. Two things I would like to do: 1. Have exim sort my mail, but retain the fvwm notification. 2. Have netscape acknowledge new mail from exim sorting 3. Have the fvwm notification thingy launch netscape mail on double clicking, not pine. (ok, I can't count) Could anyone give any hints on solving any of these problems, please. Thanks a lot Rich
Compiling with X [bit off topic]
I need to plot some graphs output from a C program, which I need to be portable to a SGI unix machine. Thus I am trying to use the xlib library. I have xlib6g-dev installed. My test program inludes the lines: #include And I compile with: gcc -I/usr/X11R6/include -L/usr/X11R6/lib myproc.c but get errors like : undefined reference to 'XOpenDisplay'. I checked in /usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xlib.h, and this contains a definition of extern Display *XOpenDisplay( . . . Could anyone please tell me what command-line options, and what includes I need to use the Xlib libraries with my c-programs? Thanks in advange Rich
Re: Compiling with X [bit off topic]
Thanks a lot, this is exactly what I wanted to know. Cheers Rich On 26 Jan 1999, Gary L. Hennigan wrote: > "Rich Harran." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > | I need to plot some graphs output from a C program, which I need to be > | portable to a SGI unix machine. Thus I am trying to use the xlib library. > | I have xlib6g-dev installed. My test program inludes the lines: > | #include > | And I compile with: > | gcc -I/usr/X11R6/include -L/usr/X11R6/lib myproc.c > | but get errors like > | : undefined reference to 'XOpenDisplay'. > | I checked in /usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xlib.h, and this contains a definition > | of > | extern Display *XOpenDisplay( . . . > | Could anyone please tell me what command-line options, and what includes I > | need to use the Xlib libraries with my c-programs? > > More important to your problem is how you're linking. As a bare > minimum I'm guessing you'll need "-L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11" flags. > > Gary > > > -- > Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null > >
netscape mail; mount on startup
I just sent the attatchedmessage to this group using netscape mail, and got a reply from the listmaster saying I should send mail from root, and that the listserver ignores mail that comes from a daemon. I thought I was sending mail from my account on my email server. Does anyone know if I can use netscape mail to send mail without getting these problems, and without having to log on as a different user? If not, could someone tell me how to get two different users (ie root + mailuser) logged on to the same X-display at the same time (I did it once, but can't reproduce). I don't just want a xterm that can't open for example an emacs window for root. My original question is in the attachment. Thanks for your help Rich Harran From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sat Nov 7 13:27:39 1998 Date: Sat, 07 Nov 1998 13:27:19 +0000 From: Rich Harran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Rich Harran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Fwd: automatic mount on startup] Rich Harran wrote: > > I have a single hardisk with a linux partition, a linux swap, and two > dos partitions. I use some of the stuff on the dos partitions in Linux > (linux can fully access them, but dos can't access the linux ones, so I > put anything I want to access from both OS's on the dos partions). I > usually mount these after I've logged in using the mount command. > > What I would really like to do is have these automatically mounted at > startup, before I even log in. This is because I have my computer in my > bedroom, so I turn it off overnight, and need to restart everyday, > making manual mounting tiresome. > > I guess I need to put the mount commands in a script somewhere, but I > don't know which one: I'm a bit of a scripting novice. > > Thanks for any help on this > Rich
Debian Crash
My Debian system just crashed. This has never happened before, which is one of the things I like about Linux. I've got a pretty standard Hamm system, and I was running X with emacs (20), xmix, and netscape, with a navigator and mail window open. I went on a webpage I've visited many times before (www.tomshardware.com), and everything seized up: the mouse wouldn't move, I couldn't move between virtual desktops and I couldn't move between virtual teminals. I waited a couple of minutes, then tried , then , neither of which had any effect whatsoever, so I pressed the big red button, and restarted that way. The only non-Debian software I have installed is xaudio, an X window mpeg layer 3 audio player, which is off /root/mpeg (I was just trying it out). My hardware is an old(ish) Cyrix 6x86 (M1) P200+ on a SuperMicro P5xtra motherboard, 32mb DRAM (2simms), Matrox millenium 4mb, WD harddrive, mitsumi Cd rom, soundblaster awe64 pnp, microsoft serial mouse. Up 'till now, everything seems to have been working fine (I've had random crashes under win95, but I think that's a feature of the OS). My questions: Is there a problem with my hardware (it's quite old)? Was there a problem with Linux? If not, is there now? If so, how do I fix it? What should I do to test the components in my system individually? I put it together myself (about 2 years ago), so I don't mind poking around inside.
Re: [Fwd: Re: Debian Crash]
On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Rich Harran wrote: > J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) wrote: > > > > On Wed, Nov 11, 1998 at 04:46:29PM +0000, Rich Harran. wrote: > > > My Debian system just crashed. > > [description] > > > > It sounds a lot like it may have been just a crash of the X server. Is your > > machine on a network? Could you still access it from the network? > > > > Ray > > -- I am on a network, but didn't have physical access to other computers at the time (there not in the same building). Would an X server crash cause the total lock-up, and is there anything I could have done to bin X without restarting? If I want to access my computer from another (if it happens again), do I have to do anything in advance at this end, or can I just telnet in, and logon as usual? Thanks for your help Rich
Re:96M RAM, but free only shows 64M!!!
I supposedly have 32Mb ram, but free says 30236. Am I misinterpreting something, or do I have a memory problem. (I only tried 'free' after following this thread!) TIA Rich Harran
Re: 96M RAM, but free only shows 64M!!
Thanks: puts my mind at rest! Rich --- Begin Message --- 32 MB minus memory used by kernel = 30236 available to other processes. Peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I supposedly have 32Mb ram, but free says 30236. Am I misinterpreting > something, or do I have a memory problem. (I only tried 'free' after > following this thread!) > > TIA > Rich Harran > > > -- > Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev > /null --- End Message ---
Re: 96M RAM, but free only shows 64M!!!
Not very enlightening: I cut and pasted: dmesg | grep Memory into an xterm, and it just did a linefeed. non the wiser Rich --- Begin Message --- On Mon, Nov 16, 1998 at 06:41:11PM +, Rich Harran. wrote: > I supposedly have 32Mb ram, but free says 30236. Am I misinterpreting > something, or do I have a memory problem. (I only tried 'free' after > following this thread!) > dmesg | grep Memory should enlighten you. -- Laurent PICOULEAU [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null --- End Message ---
