The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

angrytech posted:

Honestly I wouldn't worry about it. I've been using Ubuntu for going on 6 years and debian for 7; not once have I ever broken anything by updating.
Actually, I take that back, I sometimes broke X back when the video drivers were shittier, but that hasn't been an issue in years.

As long as you're not doing a distribution upgrade, everything should remain sane. Although if you're running a production website, test or at least check the packages out first to make sure nothing breaks.

# ? Jul 11, 2011 17:07

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# ? May 17, 2024 13:59

spankmeister: Jun 15, 2008

brc64 posted:

Alrighty, upgrading away. I've got to admit, this package management system is pretty sexy.

Yeah, until something goes wrong, then you will curse it with words you didn't even know you knew.

quote:

The server exists almost solely to store media and stream to various devices. I'm currently in the process of trying to get PS3 Media Server to work on it, but it's a bit difficult... there's no real definitive guide for configuring and running PMS (lovely acronym) on a headless server, so I'm trying to figure it out as I go.

Once you're done you can give me a few pointers because I'm planning on doing the same haha.

# ? Jul 11, 2011 17:14

angrytech: Jun 26, 2009

spankmeister posted:

Yeah, until something goes wrong, then you will curse it with words you didn't even know you knew.

I'm curious here, what sort of problems is it possible to have with apt? It's built like a god damned tank.
Granted, if someone starts adding ppas like a drunken orangutan then yeah they'll have issues.

# ? Jul 11, 2011 17:59

FISHMANPET: Mar 3, 2007; Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

One of my users managed to break Gnome on an 11.04 install I gave him on his laptop, but he's an idiot.

# ? Jul 11, 2011 18:02

Computer viking: May 30, 2011; Now with less breakage.

angrytech posted:

I'm curious here, what sort of problems is it possible to have with apt? It's built like a god damned tank.
Granted, if someone starts adding ppas like a drunken orangutan then yeah they'll have issues.

Well, I've had ubuntu upgrades that left me without working wireless, and at one point unable to log into KDE4. (And ubuntu distupgrades are a bit hit/miss, even using their custom tool for it.)

Apt itself is usually fine, though.

# ? Jul 11, 2011 20:17

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

At some point like a year ago I did something with ffmpeg, but gently caress if I can remember what.

Recently, I did a dist upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04, and now I get a daily and weekly Anacron email that says this:

code:

/etc/cron.weekly/man-db:
dpkg-query: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 13608 package 'ffmpeg':
 error in Version string '4:SVN-r26087-1': version number does not start with digit
dpkg-query: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 13654 package 'ffmpeg':
 error in Version string '4:SVN-r26087-1': version number does not start with digit

How do I fix this?

# ? Jul 11, 2011 20:21

angrytech: Jun 26, 2009

Computer viking posted:

Well, I've had ubuntu upgrades that left me without working wireless, and at one point unable to log into KDE4. (And ubuntu distupgrades are a bit hit/miss, even using their custom tool for it.)

Apt itself is usually fine, though.

That makes sense. I thought he was referring to dependency hell or something like that, which I don't think I've ever seen on a Debian-based system.

# ? Jul 11, 2011 20:22

spankmeister: Jun 15, 2008

Thermopyle, try dpkg --clear-avail then apt-get update

angrytech posted:

That makes sense. I thought he was referring to dependency hell or something like that, which I don't think I've ever seen on a Debian-based system.

Well, apt is very annoying if you go slightly off the beaten path. It can come back later to bite you in the rear end and you have to start uninstalling and purging manually setting statusses for packages manually and the like.

But if you stick to the basics it's fine.

# ? Jul 11, 2011 20:27

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

spankmeister posted:

Thermopyle, try dpkg --clear-avail then apt-get update

Well, apt is very annoying if you go slightly off the beaten path. It can come back later to bite you in the rear end and you have to start uninstalling and purging manually setting statusses for packages manually and the like.

But if you stick to the basics it's fine.

I've been hosed by weird package manager issues on almost all distributions I've used, but never so bad as apt.

# ? Jul 11, 2011 20:33

angrytech: Jun 26, 2009

Bob Morales posted:

I've been hosed by weird package manager issues on almost all distributions I've used, but never so bad as apt.

What kind of issues? I'm really curious since I've never encountered them before.

# ? Jul 11, 2011 21:02

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

angrytech posted:

What kind of issues? I'm really curious since I've never encountered them before.

Just totally weird, bizzaro poo poo. Probably caused by forcing something to install or re-configuring some low-level stuff.

# ? Jul 11, 2011 21:06

ExcessBLarg!: Sep 1, 2001

angrytech posted:

I'm curious here, what sort of problems is it possible to have with apt?

It's not so much apt as much as it is packages with inconsistent dependencies. I doubt these are ever seen in Debian testing and never seen in stable, but they happen somewhat often in unstable.

Typically a base library will be upgraded, but some library or application on top of that specifies a versioned dependency older than the updated library. Usually an "apt-get dist-upgrade" will report that the base library can't be upgraded yet, and that's fine. Other times it will suggest upgrading that library and removing a quarter of the packages on the system or something, that's not fine. But it's not a problem if you're paying attention, or just running "apt-get upgrade".

The real problem happens when you need to install a package in unstable that's suffering from an old versioned dependency. Since that package wasn't installed previously, the base library is likely already upgraded. If you attempt to install the package, it claims it can't because of an unsatisfied dependency. If you try to install the dependency, it spews various version numbers and a bunch of other babble.

But I don't really blame apt for any of that, it's just one of the things you run into when running unstable on machines. I've been doing that for over a decade now, and having the latest everything (well, almost) has been worth the occasional broken package. One of these days I might decide I've had enough and just drop down to testing once a new stable release nears (when even unstable goes into a semi-frozen state).

Edit: Also, if a package has a broken post-inst script, or attempts to overwrite a file that exists in another package, apt seizes up a bit and fun can be had. Usually a "dpkg --configure -a" flushes most of the queue and the rest can be handled by judicious use of "dpkg --force-overwrite" or manually hacking the post-inst script to return 0 at the right place. If I'm not in a hurry, it's bug report time.

ExcessBLarg! fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Jul 12, 2011

# ? Jul 12, 2011 04:44

Underflow: Apr 4, 2008; EGOMET MIHI IGNOSCO

Two quick questions:

Is it much of a pain to compile Mac software for Linux?

How do I specify which audio i/f's settings alsactl should restore? It sometimes falls back on a a DVB's digital i/o instead of the regular DSP. I've tried to call the old names in /dev as well as various labels I find in alsa.conf, but no go.

Thanks in advance.

# ? Jul 12, 2011 07:42

spankmeister: Jun 15, 2008

Underflow posted:

Two quick questions:

Is it much of a pain to compile Mac software for Linux?

Depends on the software. A simple console app can probably be done, but it's usually not possible due to the Mac-specific stuff like Cocoa, Foundation and the like.

# ? Jul 12, 2011 07:56

Mantle: May 15, 2004

I have a gPC2 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883118003) that I would like to use as a Linux server AND a firewall such as Smoothwall/m0n0wall. I have tried to install Smoothwall and use it as a regular linux distro but I'm missing too many niceties such as apt-get and a GUI. However, I do like the dedicated firewall features such as detailed logging and web-based administration. Is there a solution that I can somehow turn an Ubuntu install into something more like Smoothwall/m0n0wall?

I want to be able to run the odd Quake/Doom server as well has have the box handle firewall duties to divide my network into private and guest zones using a multi-NIC setup.

# ? Jul 12, 2011 08:40

Underflow: Apr 4, 2008; EGOMET MIHI IGNOSCO

spankmeister posted:

Depends on the software. A simple console app can probably be done, but it's usually not possible due to the Mac-specific stuff like Cocoa, Foundation and the like.

OK, thank you. Would be console related stuff, yes.

I thought I'd better ask, since someone told me yesterday she'd tried to convert some Apple package to .rpm which when installed screwed up all her ownership and permission settings in /etc. Recursively, to a non-existent userid, and a+x. 8|

# ? Jul 12, 2011 08:42

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

spankmeister posted:

Depends on the software. A simple console app can probably be done, but it's usually not possible due to the Mac-specific stuff like Cocoa, Foundation and the like.

They other things is the fact that it's BSD and not Linux, so a lot of system utilities are very different and won't transfer over.

In theory you could use OpenStep to build programs with a similar UI but it's still just way too different.

# ? Jul 12, 2011 13:59

angrytech: Jun 26, 2009

ExcessBLarg! posted:

It's not so much apt as much as it is packages with inconsistent dependencies. I doubt these are ever seen in Debian testing and never seen in stable, but they happen somewhat often in unstable.

Oh yeah, like how darwin calendar server has an unsatisfied dependency in Ubuntu Server because some chucklefuck decided to roll two libraries together. :argh:

# ? Jul 12, 2011 15:47

Computer viking: May 30, 2011; Now with less breakage.

Bob Morales posted:

They other things is the fact that it's BSD and not Linux, so a lot of system utilities are very different and won't transfer over.

In theory you could use OpenStep to build programs with a similar UI but it's still just way too different.

Eh, it's not that bad. The OS X userland resembles a reasonably current FreeBSD, and that's not a very difficult transition.

# ? Jul 12, 2011 16:24

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Computer viking posted:

Eh, it's not that bad. The OS X userland resembles a reasonably current FreeBSD, and that's not a very difficult transition.

Right, but there are quite a few useful Linux utilities that won't run on BSD.

# ? Jul 12, 2011 17:43

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Such as...?

# ? Jul 12, 2011 17:58

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

evol262 posted:

Such as...?

I can't think of any off the top of my head but usually little monitoring utilities that rely on getting their data in Linux-centric ways that don't exist or are different in BSD.

I know quite a few of them will run with the Linux-compatiblity installed.

# ? Jul 12, 2011 18:13

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

I hear this from the people who absolutely, positively can't live without htop (or whatever eye-candyish tool they happen to be using is), and I'm still not sure if inotify exists for BSD yet (or if you have to use kqueue), but as far as "things I need to get work done", I haven't found anything.

For that matter, Solaris is fine.

I guess I don't tend to think of fancier/rewritten versions of existing utilities (iotop, htop, iftop, whatever) to be mandatory, since sar/iostat/vmstat and their ilk will also be on AIX and many embedded systems if you happen to touch them, instead of being the AIX guy who can't live without smit, HP-UX guy who can't do without sam, or Linux guy who "needs" htop.

# ? Jul 12, 2011 18:23

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

evol262 posted:

I guess I don't tend to think of fancier/rewritten versions of existing utilities (iotop, htop, iftop, whatever) to be mandatory, since sar/iostat/vmstat and their ilk will also be on AIX and many embedded systems if you happen to touch them, instead of being the AIX guy who can't live without smit, HP-UX guy who can't do without sam, or Linux guy who "needs" htop.

Right, it is usually for piddly stuff like that.

# ? Jul 12, 2011 18:46

Computer viking: May 30, 2011; Now with less breakage.

Mh, true. I kind of miss a few FreeBSD monitoring and info tools on linux machines, and I assume the same happens the other way. However, a pure C project shouldn't miss those overly much ... though the config/make framework certainly might.

# ? Jul 13, 2011 01:14

JHVH-1: Jun 28, 2002

There is bsdsar but its annoying because its not as fleshed out as the linux sysstat. They couldn't even use the same flags.

For iotop on freebsd you can do this:
top -m io -o total

# ? Jul 13, 2011 01:22

kyuss: Nov 6, 2004

Question: I have a new external USB HDD hooked up to a SheevaPlug. The HDD isn't auto mounted at boot, despite the appropriate settings in etc/fstab.

code:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
UUID=bcc2ce72-afdb-4980-b86f-89e347a9b249 /               ext3    errors=remount-ro 0       1
UUID=e16add4f-446e-492a-af57-9648ec1eab69 /boot           ext2    defaults        0       2
UUID=d2140c10-1b1e-4f64-90a0-f5b987a58f30 none            swap    sw              0       0
UUID=902df9d4-fcf4-4f7a-85e5-59a2d0e8ef7c /media/usb0 auto defaults,rw,user,auto,exec 0 0

I tried another USB HDD, and it is auto-mounted fine. What could be going on here?

# ? Jul 14, 2011 20:58

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

kyuss posted:

I tried another USB HDD, and it is auto-mounted fine. What could be going on here?

Stupid question, does it have a file system on it?

# ? Jul 14, 2011 21:03

kyuss: Nov 6, 2004

Yes it has, and it is mounting fine from a terminal, as in "mount /media/usb0". It's just that it's not auto-mounted after a reboot. Makes me wonder if this is a timing problem, maybe the mount process happens before the USB drive is available?

# ? Jul 14, 2011 21:51

dolicf: Sep 12, 2010

It's possible. After a reboot, I assume that a 'mount -a' will mount it just fine?

Check dmesg, that should have some clues about why it doesn't mount at boot.

# ? Jul 15, 2011 00:43

Rescue Toaster: Mar 13, 2003

Can anyone tell me what it is that's failing to load here? Window manager? Some part of compiz? I don't even know what log to inspect (ubuntu 11.04). I'm running the nvidia proprietary drivers. Usually just doing a log out and back in fixes it, but not always. I'm getting sick of the 'Windows 2000' theme if you will.

Only registered members can see post attachments!

# ? Jul 15, 2011 00:57

dont skimp on the shrimp: Apr 23, 2008

Rescue Toaster posted:

Can anyone tell me what it is that's failing to load here? Window manager? Some part of compiz? I don't even know what log to inspect (ubuntu 11.04). I'm running the nvidia proprietary drivers. Usually just doing a log out and back in fixes it, but not always. I'm getting sick of the 'Windows 2000' theme if you will.

Your GTK2-theme. I think there was a recent bug relating to that in ubuntu 11.04, so it should go away sooner or later.

# ? Jul 15, 2011 01:29

Rescue Toaster: Mar 13, 2003

Thanks. It's hard to search when you don't even know how to describe the problem.

# ? Jul 15, 2011 01:40

waffle iron: Jan 16, 2004

kyuss posted:

Yes it has, and it is mounting fine from a terminal, as in "mount /media/usb0". It's just that it's not auto-mounted after a reboot. Makes me wonder if this is a timing problem, maybe the mount process happens before the USB drive is available?

If you're super lazy you can add mount /media/usb0 to your /etc/rc.local

Another way is to use udev rules. See:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=98166
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Udev#Auto_mounting_USB_devices

# ? Jul 15, 2011 03:23

kyuss: Nov 6, 2004

Sweet, i'll try the udev way. Thanks

# ? Jul 15, 2011 06:54

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

I love Freenode and all, but are there any other good Linux channels on IRC networks that aren't so uptight? I'm tired of getting yelled at for accidentally saying 'drat' or 'hell' or being told every other thing is off-topic, and in some cases not even allowed. Maybe I'm dreaming of some 'underground' utopia of nerds that doesn't exist.

# ? Jul 15, 2011 18:17

text editor: Jan 8, 2007

Bob Morales posted:

I love Freenode and all, but are there any other good Linux channels on IRC networks that aren't so uptight? I'm tired of getting yelled at for accidentally saying 'drat' or 'hell' or being told every other thing is off-topic, and in some cases not even allowed. Maybe I'm dreaming of some 'underground' utopia of nerds that doesn't exist.

None that I know of, but I will agree with you on Freenode. Every Linux/BSD channel should auto-ban every user with a message that says "We'd just tell you to read the manual anyways, link <here>"

That, or just jump into a channel for a lesser-known Linux distro, where people are so desperate for attention they'll solve all the problems for you.

# ? Jul 15, 2011 18:22

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

ClosedBSD posted:

None that I know of, but I will agree with you on Freenode. Every Linux/BSD channel should auto-ban every user with a message that says "We'd just tell you to read the manual anyways, link <here>"

That, or just jump into a channel for a lesser-known Linux distro, where people are so desperate for attention they'll solve all the problems for you.

They always use some snarky "Go ask in #bash" or "You're using Debian, go bother #debian". If you ask a general question about say apt in #debian, don't let them find out you're using Mint/Ubuntu/whatever. They'll crucify you.

I understand staying on topic but what's a general #linux channel for if you can't talk about everything? When I think Linux I think Apache, MySQL, GNOME, KDE, bash, vi, emacs...

I got yelled at in #c before for helping a guy out with GCC. Come on!

The BSD channels use some reverse-psychology where by not answering they force you to figure it out yourself. The forums are similar, FreeBSDForum is very good though. I always hit the mailing list (even before Google) when it comes to a BSD question.

Does DALnet or EFnet still exist?

# ? Jul 15, 2011 18:29

text editor: Jan 8, 2007

Bob Morales posted:

Does DALnet or EFnet still exist?

Yes, but I don't think they have quite the traffic Freenode does. Searching through the DALnet channel listing it looks like some of the Linux channels are still active - EFnet looks like it's pretty dead though. Most of the people in Freenode are idle though, only occasionally chiming in with a snarky answers; so maybe the smaller populations on the other networks are actually active users.

# ? Jul 15, 2011 18:47

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# ? May 17, 2024 13:59

spankmeister: Jun 15, 2008

EFNet is mostly warez bots anyways.

# ? Jul 15, 2011 20:11

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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