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

Misogynist posted:

Have you used 4.3.0? Attempting to maximize any window moves it to your leftmost monitor.

I couldn't handle OSX anymore after spending 2 hours ripping my hair out over a loss of networking until I realized OSX freaked on a switch-level configuration change and refused to route anything until it was rebooted. So I'm back to Openstack+Foreman for one-off VMs and virt-manager for my normal virtualization stuff, and I haven't had a need to touch VBox.

Virtualbox's multi-monitor support was always a little off. Guessing which order it'd place the monitors when you fullscreened it again was a trial. But at least it worked. VMware Tools didn't/doesn't work at all with Fedora 19 (nor does openvm-tools) with Fusion 5 or Fusion 6. I guess that's what I get for not using Ubuntu or RHEL.

# ? Oct 24, 2013 20:57

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# ? May 10, 2024 00:08

Stealthgerbil: Dec 16, 2004

I am trying to set up software raid with two SSDs using centOS. Is there anything special I need to do for that? I am still a newbie at the hardware side of linux but I think I make a raid partition on each drive and then combine them into a raid device? Does anyone have a good guide for this? I mainly only have experience with VPSes so I am trying to learn about the hardware side.

# ? Oct 24, 2013 20:58

fletcher: Jun 27, 2003; ken park is my favorite movie; Cybernetic Crumb

Misogynist posted:

I think most people interested in pinning specific package versions should be running their own apt repos and pulling down whatever packages they need. It gives you more control (you don't need to worry about old versions going missing), your local mirror is going to be faster, and it cuts down on the number of external dependencies that might be broken when you go to install a new system. Most of the apt repo management software out there is a trainwreck built for managing repositories with tens of thousands of packages. You'll be fine with something that reads your files and dumps a Packages index.

I use a really simple tool called prm to manage our (small) local repositories, and then I sync them to S3 with s3cmd. Where it's necessary, I pin specific versions using the apt_preference LWRP in the apt cookbook.

I like the sound of this a lot more. I was looking at running my own apt mirror but it just seemed like so much overhead, prm looks a lot simpler. Gonna give this a whirl, thanks for the advice!

Misogynist posted:

If you think GUI performance under VirtualBox is the same as bare metal, when VBox multi-monitor support even works right at all, your eyes clearly run at 10 Hz and you should see a neurologist.

I usually only run it in single monitor mode (vm on the left monitor, web browser on host os on the right monitor), but I have tried multi-monitor mode and it seemed to work great. My eyes are usually pretty sensitive to refresh rates too. I wasn't exactly straining the UI though, just an IDE and a web browser.

# ? Oct 24, 2013 20:59

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

Stealthgerbil posted:

I am trying to set up software raid with two SSDs using centOS. Is there anything special I need to do for that? I am still a newbie at the hardware side of linux but I think I make a raid partition on each drive and then combine them into a raid device? Does anyone have a good guide for this? I mainly only have experience with VPSes so I am trying to learn about the hardware side.

Set the partition type to "Linux RAID Autodetect" ('fd' in fdisk, I think).

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --raid-devices=2 --level=mirror /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 #--metadata=0.99 if you need to boot from it, but don't do this on CentOS, just make a separate /boot on a regular partition
mdadm --detail --scan >> /dev/mdadm.conf
chkconfig mdadm on
echo "/dev/md0 /mountpoint ...." >> /etc/fstab

# ? Oct 24, 2013 21:17

Stealthgerbil: Dec 16, 2004

Thanks that helped. Now I am running into an issue where it cant find the mirror.

http://pastebin.com/z2vgPf8z

I assume that means it cant find the filelists.sqlite.bz2 repo? or am I getting confused. I am still dumb when it comes to dependency hell

edit2: fixed im dumb

Stealthgerbil fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Oct 25, 2013

# ? Oct 25, 2013 02:27

Baron Bifford: May 24, 2006; Can't post for 2 years!

spankmeister posted:

Yes but then you will only be able to boot ubuntu.

You really need to keep that partition, or reinstall windows without the partition.
(With 7 you could trick the installer not to create that partition, not sure if you can with 8)
Besides, what is 350mb anyway these days?

350MB is not much, but my 1 hard drive can only support so many partitions. For Ubuntu, I will need one for boot, on for the OS, and one for the swap. If I can get rid of the Win8 boot partition, I would have no problems.

# ? Oct 25, 2013 11:16

Qtotonibudinibudet: Nov 7, 2011; Omich poluyobok, skazhi ty narkoman? ya prosto tozhe gde to tam zhivu, mogli by vmeste uyobyvat' narkotiki

Do kids these days seriously not know what an extended partition is these days?

That said, you don't actually need a separate boot or swap partition on most modern systems.

# ? Oct 25, 2013 12:57

a slime: Apr 11, 2005

Does anyone have some experience with dnsmasq? I have a desktop computer with a static IP, and a laptop that gets a IP via DHCP over wireless. I want my desktop to be able to access my laptop via a hostname. Is dnsmasq the right tool for this? How do I tell my laptop to update my desktop when it obtains a new IP?

# ? Oct 25, 2013 13:01

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

fivre posted:

Do kids these days seriously not know what an extended partition is these days?

That said, you don't actually need a separate boot or swap partition on most modern systems.

Nor is this legacy MS-DOS concept of primary/extended/logical partitions even a thing when using GPT partition tables, which should be the norm basically everywhere in 2013.

# ? Oct 25, 2013 15:30

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

fivre posted:

That said, you don't actually need a separate boot or swap partition on most modern systems.

Both of these recommendations are terrible.

Having a separate /boot is a lifesaver in a number of situations, and it costs you essentially nothing.

Swap is still essential the majority of power-management tasks (hibernate in particular).

On a server, you can do without both (though I still wouldn't). For a desktop, you should have /boot. For a laptop, both.

a slime posted:

Does anyone have some experience with dnsmasq? I have a desktop computer with a static IP, and a laptop that gets a IP via DHCP over wireless. I want my desktop to be able to access my laptop via a hostname. Is dnsmasq the right tool for this? How do I tell my laptop to update my desktop when it obtains a new IP?

dnsmasq already does "dynamic DNS", which is what you want. You can use isc-dhcpd and BIND, but dnsmasq pretty much "just works" for this. But you'll have to let it handle DHCP, too.

# ? Oct 25, 2013 16:12

Baron Bifford: May 24, 2006; Can't post for 2 years!

Welp, I tried Fedora then went immediately back to Windows when I found out that my Soundblaster card isn't supported in Linux. :P

# ? Oct 25, 2013 16:31

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

What's the PCI ID? Sound cards stopped changing in 2003, so I'm genuinely surprised if there's something stopping you here.

# ? Oct 25, 2013 16:47

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

Baron Bifford posted:

Welp, I tried Fedora then went immediately back to Windows when I found out that my Soundblaster card isn't supported in Linux. :P

Not that it's impossible that you're right, but I feel pretty confident in saying you're wrong.

# ? Oct 25, 2013 16:57

Cidrick: Jun 10, 2001; Praise the siamese

I feel like I just read a usenet post from 1997

# ? Oct 25, 2013 16:57

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Cidrick posted:

I feel like I just read a usenet post from 1997

Even just reading about discrete sound cards, I feel like I'm back in 2003. Is there a V.92 Modem Blaster in that thing?

# ? Oct 25, 2013 16:58

Baron Bifford: May 24, 2006; Can't post for 2 years!

It's a Creative Labs Fatal1ty, and the official website lists drivers only for Windows. I've read rumors about beta drivers floating around but I couldn't find them. Oh well, I think I shall ditch CL cards for my next PC.

Cidrick posted:

I feel like I just read a usenet post from 1997

Funnily enough, 1997 was the last time I tried Linux. My installation had no drivers for my ISDN card, so I was totally cut off from support. With Windows, everything just... works.

Baron Bifford fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Oct 25, 2013

# ? Oct 25, 2013 17:01

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

Do me a favor. Hold the Windows key and press Pause/Break. Click "Device Manager", then find your sound card under "Sound, video and game controllers". Double-click on it, go to the Details tab, and then choose "Hardware Ids".

You should be in a place like this. Right-click on the longest device ID you can find, and paste it here.

That contains a mangled version of the PCI ID, and will let me figure out if Linux has any support for it or not.

# ? Oct 25, 2013 17:06

Cidrick: Jun 10, 2001; Praise the siamese

Baron Bifford posted:

It's a Creative Labs Fatal1ty, and the official website lists drivers only for Windows. I've read rumors about beta drivers floating around but I couldn't find them. Oh well, I think I shall ditch CL cards for my next PC.

Most audio devices will still have a chipset that somebody has made a generic driver for, even if the vendor doesn't explicitly support it in Linux (which is what Suspicious Dish is trying to help you figure out).

But echoing what Misogynist said above - discrete audio is, by and large, a thing of the past. It's typically reserved for audiophiles and people who do audio production for a living.

# ? Oct 25, 2013 17:08

Baron Bifford: May 24, 2006; Can't post for 2 years!

OK, I think I'll go look again for these third-party drivers.

There's another problem I'm having with Fedora. I installed it alongside Windows 8, and it installed a boot manager that allows me to choose between booting Linux and Windows. This boot manager runs very slowly and sometimes freezes altogether. My installation of Fedora itself was also problematic - lots of plaintive beeping from the motherboard. Is it possible I have a problem with my motherboard? I use a Intel DX58SO, 6GB RAM, Core i7 2.6GHz (LG1366). This is the real reason I went back to Windows-only; my system became unreliable.

Baron Bifford fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Oct 25, 2013

# ? Oct 25, 2013 17:23

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Cidrick posted:

But echoing what Misogynist said above - discrete audio is, by and large, a thing of the past. It's typically reserved for audiophiles and people who do audio production for a living.

People who do audio production for a living typically have something much more advanced than a discrete add-in sound card, though. It would normally be something with at least four XLR inputs, phantom power, and hardware gain controls.

OpenAL used to be a thing who were really into immersive audio in their games, but OpenAL Soft has largely supplanted it these days, right?

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Oct 25, 2013

# ? Oct 25, 2013 18:06

My Rhythmic Crotch: Jan 13, 2011

So I have like 100 machines that I need to change to open a Real VNC client when they click on a particular text file (using Firefox). It's a file like this:

code:

xdg-mime query filetype our_special_file.vnc 
text/plain; charset=us-ascii

I'm not so sure that I want to make Real VNC the default application for files with that mime-type because it's so generic.

Firefox, on the other hand, knows right off the bat that it's a "VNC file" - not just a generic text file. If I can set the association within Firefox, and not on the Gnome-level, that should work out the best. Does anyone know of a way to push that change out to a bunch of machines? My google-fu is not helping here.

edit: These machines are using an ancient version of Firefox, 3.6.24, which stores its config in a file:
/home/billybob/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/mimeTypes.rdf. I was originally thinking the config would be stored in a binary. (Maybe it is in later versions?) The relevant chunk to add in this case looks like:

code:

  <RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:externalApplication:application/vnd.vncviewer"
                   NC:path="/usr/bin/VNC-Viewer-5.0.6-Linux-x64"
                   NC:prettyName="VNC-Viewer-5.0.6-Linux-x64" />

Mystery appears solved.

My Rhythmic Crotch fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Oct 25, 2013

# ? Oct 25, 2013 19:19

Cidrick: Jun 10, 2001; Praise the siamese

Misogynist posted:

People who do audio production for a living typically have something much more advanced than a discrete add-in sound card, though. It would normally be something with at least four XLR inputs, phantom power, and hardware gain controls.

Well, sure, if you go that far on the spectrum of professional audio production. I would also include "power users" in my list who do simpler stuff, like people who do podcasts for a living, or someone who reviews mid-tier headphones and have to benchmark frequency ranges and the like.

Cidrick fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Oct 25, 2013

# ? Oct 25, 2013 19:38

reading: Jul 27, 2013

Bash scripting question. I want to make a script that will run in the background and once a minute check to see if someone else has logged on to this machine (it's on a shared network). I'm having problems with my if statement:

Bash code:

# To do: make it not care if someone logs off, only if they log on.

PEOPLE_LOGGED_ON=$(who | awk '{ print $1 }' | uniq)

# run in background
# sed '/reading/d' deletes all lines containing an instance of "reading".
# This is not robust against people whose name includes "reading"!
while :
do
	if [ "$(who | awk '{ print $1 }' | uniq)" != "$PEOPLE_LOGGED_ON" ]
		NEWPERSON=$(who | sed '/reading/d' | awk '{ print $1 }' | uniq)
		echo "NEWPERSON is $NEWPERSON"
		then 
			echo "$NEWPERSON has logged on."
	fi
	PEOPLE_LOGGED_ON=$(who | awk '{ print $1 }' | uniq)
	sleep 5
done

Currently it activates all the time, every 5 seconds, even when there isn't a change in $PEOPLE_LOGGED_ON (i.e. no one has logged on or off). I don't know why that if statement is always executing. Since there's no change, it just prints " has logged on." every 5s. The 5s is for debugging purposes, I'll change it to sleep 1m later.

reading fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Oct 25, 2013

# ? Oct 25, 2013 23:16

FullEmpty: Apr 30, 2013

Clean up your if statement to resemble the following and things will fall into place:

code:

  if [ "$(who | awk '{ print $1 }' | uniq)" != "$PEOPLE_LOGGED_ON" ]; then                                                                                                                     
    NEWPERSON=$(who | sed '/reading/d' | awk '{ print $1 }' | uniq)                                                                                                                            
    echo "NEWPERSON is $NEWPERSON"                                                                                                                                                             
  else                                                                                                                                                                                         
    echo "no change since last loop..."                                                                                                                                                           
  fi
...

# ? Oct 26, 2013 00:24

waffle iron: Jan 16, 2004

You might want to consider using the command inotifywatch or inotifywait to watch /var/run/utmp instead of polling the who command.

waffle iron fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Oct 26, 2013

# ? Oct 26, 2013 08:07

reading: Jul 27, 2013

waffle iron posted:

You might want to consider using the command inotifywatch or inotifywait to watch /var/run/utmp instead of polling the who command.

Thanks for introducing me to these tools. Unfortunately they're not on the system nor can I install them.

@FullEmpty - thanks for the tips.

# ? Oct 26, 2013 16:59

headlight: Nov 4, 2003

A pretty newbie question, but is there a way I can debug a problem with shutting down?

I am running raspbian on a pi server and using "sudo shutdown -r now" or "sudo reboot" just returns me to the command prompt. If I do it several times in a row sometimes it works, but wondering if there is a log file or something I can look at to see what is happening that stops the shutdown process. (I am guessing something is running in the background that prevents it finishing?)

# ? Oct 26, 2013 23:42

3spades: Mar 20, 2003; 37! My girlfriend sucked 37 dicks!

Customer: In a row?

Are you logging kernel messages? On our servers the kernel messages are shown on serial console so we can watch init trying to stop the running daemons. Check out syslog(d) or klog(d).

# ? Oct 27, 2013 14:34

Baron Bifford: May 24, 2006; Can't post for 2 years!

I've already asked this question but I'm repeating it because I've got new info:

I have a problem with Fedora. I installed it alongside Windows 8, and it installed a boot manager that allows me to choose between booting Linux and Windows. This boot manager runs very slowly and sometimes freezes altogether. My installation of Fedora itself was also problematic - lots of plaintive beeping from the motherboard and slowdowns. Is it possible I have a problem with my motherboard? I use a Intel DX58SO, 6GB RAM, Core i7 2.6GHz (LG1366), 1TB hard drive. This is the real reason I went back to Windows-only; my system became unreliable.

I asked some guys at work about this and they suggest that it's a problem with my BIOS, that I should switch to legacy BIOS instead of UEFI. Could they be right?

# ? Oct 27, 2013 16:41

spankmeister: Jun 15, 2008

Yes that's possible.

# ? Oct 27, 2013 17:06

Baron Bifford: May 24, 2006; Can't post for 2 years!

What do I risk and what do I stand to lose by switching to legacy BIOS?

# ? Oct 27, 2013 17:22

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

Baron Bifford posted:

I asked some guys at work about this and they suggest that it's a problem with my BIOS, that I should switch to legacy BIOS instead of UEFI. Could they be right?

It's possible that you have hardware problems, especially if grub misbehaves. It's unlikely that it's an EFI problem, though. dmesg or /var/log/messages would be needed to tell what's happening. "Grub unreliable -> serious hardware problems", generally

# ? Oct 27, 2013 17:23

Baron Bifford: May 24, 2006; Can't post for 2 years!

I notice my BIOS menu works sluggishly.

Time to build a new PC, methinks. This one is 3 years old. Good thing I've been saving money for just this.

evol262 posted:

It's possible that you have hardware problems, especially if grub misbehaves. It's unlikely that it's an EFI problem, though. dmesg or /var/log/messages would be needed to tell what's happening. "Grub unreliable -> serious hardware problems", generally

I reformatted my hard drive and did a clean Windows install. How can I get this info from Windows?

Baron Bifford fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Oct 27, 2013

# ? Oct 27, 2013 18:02

FullEmpty: Apr 30, 2013

Have you tried running http://www.memtest.org/
Most Linux installers already have it in the boot menu.

# ? Oct 27, 2013 18:23

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

Quick question, how many of you have run Linux on IBM Power?

What did you think?

# ? Oct 27, 2013 18:59

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

Tab8715 posted:

Quick question, how many of you have run Linux on IBM Power?

What did you think?

It's fine if you have old, out-of-support AIX hardware. We ran it on P520+es and a few others. I'd probably never do it intentionally unless you already have the hardware. RHEL on PPC is not that different from x86_64 RHEL, though.

# ? Oct 27, 2013 20:43

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

IBM pays us to support RHEL on PPC. Expect various things to crash randomly as lots of software hasn't been tested on big-endian architecture.

# ? Oct 27, 2013 20:44

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

Suspicious Dish posted:

IBM pays us to support RHEL on PPC. Expect various things to crash randomly as lots of software hasn't been tested on big-endian architecture.

Granted, but the user experience is pretty equivalent.

# ? Oct 27, 2013 21:04

Ninja Rope: Oct 22, 2005; Wee.

Do kernel patches/features fed back to RHEL eventually make it into the upstream kernel? Does RH even accept those kind of patches from customers?

# ? Oct 27, 2013 21:39

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# ? May 10, 2024 00:08

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

Every single RHEL kernel patch that we release in a final build or errata has been submitted upstream at some point. I don't know if we accept patches directly from our customers, but we do backport fixes that customers/competitors like Oracle submit upstream to RHEL as well.

# ? Oct 27, 2013 22:10

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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