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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bol: Jul 30, 2003; Crazy Canadian

Jack Fool posted:

lilbean told you the difference between the two (typing root passwd vs typing the current account's passwd), whether or not there's anything 'wrong' with it is more a matter of context: if you are running production servers with multiple admins it's better not to hand out the root password at all, and it's best to have seperate accounts who can sudo to whichever account they need access to.

Since my current employer is moving towards PCI Compliance (large scale credit card processing) I've been screwing around with this sudosh program (records all actions performed as sudo) and learning all about the sudoers file as a consequence. Much simpler and more useful than I'd thought before I'd spent any time with it.

We're doing the same thing with PCI compliance. sudosh + single sign on (we're doing AD integration) works quite well. Dump those syslogs to a server somewhere running Splunk and you'll be laughing.

# ? Oct 5, 2007 03:46

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# ? May 26, 2024 21:12

Jonny 290: May 5, 2005; [ASK] me about OS/2 Warp

I'll admit it - I'm a longtime root abuser - but I've given up su/root in favor of sudo. Saves time (i've linked 'sd' to sudo for speed) and I can recap everything I do by grepping auth.log. Good poo poo, for sure, and I'm kicking myself for not complying sooner.

# ? Oct 5, 2007 04:02

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

nbv4 posted:

How the heck do you get a program to run in the background? For instance I'm trying to get gmail-notify to run without needing a terminal window running at all times.

I try the command "gmail-notify" and I get a screenful of words, and if I close that screen, the program exits. You're probable saying to yourself, "this sod needs to learn himself some &", but no! "gmail-notify &" gives me the exact same result. Come to think of it, the amperstand has failed me when attempting to run other programs in the background as well.

Does one have to "enable" the amperstand somewhere or some crap?

The program runs in background just fine. Then you close the terminal window, so it sends a SIGHUP ("hangup" signal) to everything runing in it, so your program is killed unless it ignores that signal. If you exit shell by typing "exit" or pressing <Ctrl>+D on an empty line, terminal exits without sending hangup, and your program continues running. Another way to keep a background process running is running it with nohup -- nohup redirects program's output to a file nohup.out, and disables SIGHUP.

Some programs insist on having a terminal -- to run them in a background you can start them in screen session, and detach it ("screen -dm <your command line>"). screen provides its own terminal, and you can later reconnect to it by running "screen -r".

# ? Oct 5, 2007 07:31

deimos: Nov 30, 2006; Forget it man this bat is whack, it's got poobrain!

teapot posted:

Another way to keep a background process running is running it with nohup -- nohup redirects program's output to a file nohup.out, and disables SIGHUP.

This is only the case if you don't already redirect the output (at least from my experience), nohup does not even create nohup.out if you redirect.

code:

deimos@erebus:~$ nohup ps aux &> /dev/null
deimos@erebus:~$ cat nohup.out 
cat: nohup.out: No such file or directory
deimos@erebus:~$ nohup ps aux
nohup: appending output to `nohup.out'
deimos@erebus:~$ cat nohup.out 
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
...

deimos fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Oct 5, 2007

# ? Oct 5, 2007 07:48

Crush: Jan 18, 2004; jot bought me this account, I now have to suck him off.

Is there any other way to identify the processor name other than:

code:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name"

This returns the name twice, where as I only want it to show up once.

Edit: In case there was any question, it is because I have a dual core processor:

code:

matthew@matthew-desktop:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name"
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+

Edit 2: head -n5

Crush fucked around with this message at 10:21 on Oct 5, 2007

# ? Oct 5, 2007 10:11

dfn_doe: Apr 12, 2005; I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW STUPID FUCKING CATCHPHRASE OVERLORDS

Crush posted:

Is there any other way to identify the processor name other than:
code:
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name"
This returns the name twice, where as I only want it to show up once.

Edit: In case there was any question, it is because I have a dual core processor:
code:
matthew@matthew-desktop:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name"
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+
Edit 2: head -n5

code:

cat /proc/cpuinfo |egrep '^model name'|uniq

You can use "sort -u" instead of uniq on some platforms it may return unexpected results though. I.E. Solaris before 9

# ? Oct 5, 2007 21:04

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

deimos posted:

This is only the case if you don't already redirect the output (at least from my experience), nohup does not even create nohup.out if you redirect.
code:
deimos@erebus:~$ nohup ps aux &> /dev/null
deimos@erebus:~$ cat nohup.out 
cat: nohup.out: No such file or directory
deimos@erebus:~$ nohup ps aux
nohup: appending output to `nohup.out'
deimos@erebus:~$ cat nohup.out 
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
...

If sighup's own stdout is not a terminal, it doesn't create nohup.out and redirects stderr to whatever its stdout is.

# ? Oct 5, 2007 21:48

Steve French: Sep 8, 2003

Crush posted:

Is there any other way to identify the processor name other than:
code:
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name"
This returns the name twice, where as I only want it to show up once.

Edit: In case there was any question, it is because I have a dual core processor:
code:
matthew@matthew-desktop:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name"
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+
Edit 2: head -n5

Another solution:

code:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name" -m 1

# ? Oct 5, 2007 21:48

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

dfn_doe posted:

code:
cat /proc/cpuinfo |egrep '^model name'|uniq
You can use "sort -u" instead of uniq on some platforms it may return unexpected results though. I.E. Solaris before 9

Multiple CPU model name strings may not be the same -- sometimes I see first CPU described in detail, the second one as something more generic. Ex:

code:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo |egrep '^model name'|uniq
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) MP 2600+
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
$

No, I don't know why.

On the other hand,

code:

egrep "^model name" < /proc/cpuinfo | head -n1 | sed 's/^.*: *//'

always returns the model name from the first entry.

teapot fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Oct 5, 2007

# ? Oct 5, 2007 21:54

Steve French: Sep 8, 2003

teapot posted:

Multiple CPU model name strings may not be the same -- sometimes I see first CPU described in detail, the second one as something more generic. Ex:
code:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo |egrep '^model name'|uniq
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) MP 2600+
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
$ 
No, I don't know why.

On the other hand,
code:
egrep "^model name" < /proc/cpuinfo | head -n1 | sed 's/^.*: *//'
always returns the model name from the first entry.

Is there any advantage to doing it that way vs my solution?

# ? Oct 6, 2007 00:43

dfn_doe: Apr 12, 2005; I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW STUPID FUCKING CATCHPHRASE OVERLORDS

Steve French posted:

Is there any advantage to doing it that way vs my solution?

nope

# ? Oct 6, 2007 00:54

Leathal: Oct 29, 2004; wanna be like gucci?
lil buddy eat your vegetables

I could have sworn it used to work, but for some reason Brasero doesn't burn discs for me.

It stops on "Getting size" right after I hit the burn button, but it doesn't freeze. I can hit cancel and go back to the project screen.

The only thing I can find on google is this. I poked around some more and found this, which seems to say that Brasero gets installed without the proper dependencies being installed.

I popped up Synaptic to see if I could install the stuff mentioned in the second link, but I can't find cdrtools or some of the other ones.

Any ideas?

# ? Oct 6, 2007 17:25

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

How should I rename large amount of files with non-printable characters? I recently moved some harddrives between systems and lot of the files had umlauts in the names. The files were created on the old computer under ISO-8859-1 encoding and the new computer uses UTF-8.

I could rename them manually, but actually locating them would be a problem. I haven't figured a way to give such a non-printable character as a search parameter for find. Most of the files have just "�" and "�" characters, but some may also other random special characters, like accents, so I would also have to find all the files with non-ASCII characters.

This could be solved if I could somehow use the hex or octal codes of the characters with find. "�" has octal 344, hex E4, "�" has octal 366, hex F6.

# ? Oct 6, 2007 18:10

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

Saukkis posted:

How should I rename large amount of files with non-printable characters? I recently moved some harddrives between systems and lot of the files had umlauts in the names. The files were created on the old computer under ISO-8859-1 encoding and the new computer uses UTF-8.

I could rename them manually, but actually locating them would be a problem. I haven't figured a way to give such a non-printable character as a search parameter for find. Most of the files have just "�" and "�" characters, but some may also other random special characters, like accents, so I would also have to find all the files with non-ASCII characters.

This could be solved if I could somehow use the hex or octal codes of the characters with find. "�" has octal 344, hex E4, "�" has octal 366, hex F6.

/home/someuser/replacechars.sh script (should be executable):

code:

#!/bin/sh
for i in $*
do
j=`echo "$i" | tr \
'\344\366' \
'ao' \
`
echo "$i -> $j"
mv "$i" "$j"
done

'\344\366' is a sring composed of octal represntations of characters corresponding to the next string, in this case 'ao'.

Command lines:

to find all files with non-ASCII names (set terminal font/charset to ISO 8859-1 to see them properly):

code:

LANG=en_US.US-ASCII find /home/someuser/somedirectory -regextype posix-egrep -not \
-regex '[[:alnum:][:punct:][:space:]]*' -print0 | \
xargs -0 echo

to rename them:

code:

LANG=en_US.US-ASCII find /home/someuser/somedirectory -regextype posix-egrep -not \
-regex '[[:alnum:][:punct:][:space:]]*' -print0 | \
xargs -0 /home/someuser/replacechars.sh

teapot fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Oct 7, 2007

# ? Oct 7, 2007 02:52

Crush: Jan 18, 2004; jot bought me this account, I now have to suck him off.

I seem to be having trouble understanding sgrep.

Say I have a file that might read

code:

duration: 2
duration: 3
duration: 2
duration: 3
duration: 2
etc..

I want to make sure that said file alternates between duration: 2 and duration: 3 at least once. How would I go about doing this? Is there a better tool than sgrep for the job?

# ? Oct 7, 2007 08:32

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

Crush posted:

I seem to be having trouble understanding sgrep.

Say I have a file that might read
code:
duration: 2
duration: 3
duration: 2
duration: 3
duration: 2
etc..
I want to make sure that

"make sure" <- Do you mean "determine if"?

quote:

said file alternates

"alternate" <- Do you mean "contains the sequence: one occurence of one of the strings followed by one occurence of the other string", "contains the sequence: one occurence of one of the string followed by one occurence of the other string, then the occurence of the first string", of any of the remaining half a dozen possible definition of "alternate"?

quote:

between duration: 2 and duration: 3 at least once.

quote:

How would I go about doing this? Is there a better tool than sgrep for the job?

# ? Oct 7, 2007 09:30

Crush: Jan 18, 2004; jot bought me this account, I now have to suck him off.

teapot posted:

"make sure" <- Do you mean "determine if"?

Yes

teapot posted:

"alternate" <- Do you mean "contains the sequence: one occurence of one of the strings followed by one occurence of the other string", "contains the sequence: one occurence of one of the string followed by one occurence of the other string, then the occurence of the first string", of any of the remaining half a dozen possible definition of "alternate"?

Essentially, I want to make sure that

code:

duration: 2
duration: 3

happens at least once (but it would most likely happen A LOT).

# ? Oct 7, 2007 12:47

haunted bong: Jun 24, 2007

I've got a question:

I recently fixed up a 2 year old laptop, and plan on throwing Linux on it. How is the wi-fi support, because back when I used Linux with some regularity, it was a bitch to set up.

(Note: I'll be using Ubuntu)

# ? Oct 8, 2007 02:10

Zuph: Jul 24, 2003; Zupht0r 6000 Turbo Type-R

Bubba Ho-Tep posted:

I've got a question:

I recently fixed up a 2 year old laptop, and plan on throwing Linux on it. How is the wi-fi support, because back when I used Linux with some regularity, it was a bitch to set up.

(Note: I'll be using Ubuntu)

What wireless chipset is the laptop using? Some chipsets are supported out-of-box, 100% and couldn't be easier, and others are a bitch. It really depends.

# ? Oct 8, 2007 02:31

Scaevolus: Apr 16, 2007

Bubba Ho-Tep posted:

I've got a question:

I recently fixed up a 2 year old laptop, and plan on throwing Linux on it. How is the wi-fi support, because back when I used Linux with some regularity, it was a bitch to set up.

(Note: I'll be using Ubuntu)

I've never used wireless with Linux myself, but I hear Ubuntu's wireless support is excellent.

# ? Oct 8, 2007 02:32

haunted bong: Jun 24, 2007

Zuph posted:

What wireless chipset is the laptop using? Some chipsets are supported out-of-box, 100% and couldn't be easier, and others are a bitch. It really depends.

I'm not really sure, but it's a Dell Inspiron 8600, so I'm hoping it's a fairly common one.

# ? Oct 8, 2007 03:36

deimos: Nov 30, 2006; Forget it man this bat is whack, it's got poobrain!

Bubba Ho-Tep posted:

I'm not really sure, but it's a Dell Inspiron 8600, so I'm hoping it's a fairly common one.

Probably a Broadcomm :barf:

it'll most likely be supported through ndiswrapper. Which is fairly standard now a days.

Both my Linux computers run wireless out of the box but that's because I knew what I was buying before I did. My Vostro 1500 I ordered with the Intel adapter and I got a specific D-Link PCI adapter for Atheros goodness.

# ? Oct 8, 2007 04:16

Vanadium: Jan 8, 2005

Bubba Ho-Tep posted:

I'm not really sure, but it's a Dell Inspiron 8600, so I'm hoping it's a fairly common one.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Dell_Inspiron_8600#Dell_Wireless_1450_Dual-Band_WLAN_miniPCI_Card ?

# ? Oct 8, 2007 04:21

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

deimos posted:

Probably a Broadcomm it'll most likely be supported through ndiswrapper. Which is fairly standard now a days.

Both my Linux computers run wireless out of the box but that's because I knew what I was buying before I did. My Vostro 1500 I ordered with the Intel adapter and I got a specific D-Link PCI adapter for Atheros goodness.

I wish, my -EBROADCOM joke was getting old.

To whoever doesn't get it -- it's a fake kernel code that returns "Broadcom error" when it detects a Broadcom card unless the card is wired Ethernet. The real reason for Broadcom devices not working in Linux without ndiswrapper is the fact that Broadcom has a long-standing tradition of refusing to publish its consumer/wireless cards interfaces or to release its own Linux drivers, so neither Broadcom nor anyone outside of it can make a decent driver for them. This is despite the fact that Broadcom gets loads upon loads of money from Linux users who buy its other hardware, including its Ethernet chips commonly used on server boards and its chipsets for Linksys wireless access points.

To Bubba Ho-Tep: there is no noticeable difference between distributions in hardware support as long as you use latest versions. They are all based on current stable versions of Linux kernel and utilities, and at most some may include additional patches into the standard distro's kernel while others will wait for them to be blessed by Linus and included into "mainline" kernel.

ndiswrapper is indeed supported by pretty much all distros, so wireless is usable, it just uses Windows drivers, and that often messes with suspend/resume and is less reliable than cards with native drivers.

teapot fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Oct 8, 2007

# ? Oct 8, 2007 05:05

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

Crush posted:

Yes

Essentially, I want to make sure that
code:
duration: 2
duration: 3
happens at least once (but it would most likely happen A LOT).

The simpliest way to check for it (assuming that "-" in place of newline does not produce something that may be also present in the file):

code:

tr '\n' - < [i]infile[/i] | grep "duration: 2-duration: 3"

# ? Oct 8, 2007 05:11

Crush: Jan 18, 2004; jot bought me this account, I now have to suck him off.

teapot posted:

The simpliest way to check for it (assuming that "-" in place of newline does not produce something that may be also present in the file):
code:
tr '\n' - < [i]infile[/i] | grep "duration: 2-duration: 3"

Interesting, will give this a try.

Edit: Ok, I ran this and it instantly just went back to the prompt without saying anything. I then changed the 3 to a random number like 1223432432 and ran it again and the same thing happened. What am I to do with this? Thanks for your help by the way.

Crush fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Oct 8, 2007

# ? Oct 8, 2007 05:13

Ilya: Mar 11, 2007; Connoisseur of fine cats

Crush posted:

Interesting, will give this a try.

Edit: Ok, I ran this and it instantly just went back to the prompt without saying anything. I then changed the 3 to a random number like 1223432432 and ran it again and the same thing happened. What am I to do with this? Thanks for your help by the way.

Here's the best (or at least most proper) way of doing it:

code:

xargs < test.txt | grep "(2 duration: 3\|3 duration: 2)*"

xargs "flattens" the multiple lines into one, which you want to do because what you are trying to accomplish is not to filter certain lines, but really check whether a single string fits a pattern.

And then the pattern you are looking for is obvious: either string 1 followed by string 2, or string 2 followed by string 1.

# ? Oct 8, 2007 07:22

smug forum asshole: Jan 15, 2005

How can I send a keystroke to a process that isn't focused?

I'm not too good with this jargon, so let me try explain more in depth:

I run screen with a few different programs running inside of it. One of these programs is a music streamer, Shell.FM. I'd like to be able to use cron to tell Shell.FM to stop playing music at a certain time. The problem here is that Shell.FM can only be told to stop by pressing shift+s. Of course, I could just use cron to kill the process, but I don't want to kill the process -- I'd like to keep shell-fm running, but just tell it to stop.

# ? Oct 8, 2007 07:39

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

Crush posted:

Interesting, will give this a try.

Edit: Ok, I ran this and it instantly just went back to the prompt without saying anything. I then changed the 3 to a random number like 1223432432 and ran it again and the same thing happened. What am I to do with this? Thanks for your help by the way.

It checks specifically for those strings, so you have to keep spaces/capitalization/... the same in matching strings and in the file you test. If it returned nothing, it means, nothing matched, otherwise it returns a string that will be the whole file with dashes instead of newlines. For the use in scripts it's more important that return value of grep is 0 if it matched, nonzero if it didn't.

teapot fucked around with this message at 10:12 on Oct 8, 2007

# ? Oct 8, 2007 10:10

Crush: Jan 18, 2004; jot bought me this account, I now have to suck him off.

Ilya posted:

Here's the best (or at least most proper) way of doing it:
code:
xargs < test.txt | grep "(2 duration: 3\|3 duration: 2)*"		
xargs "flattens" the multiple lines into one, which you want to do because what you are trying to accomplish is not to filter certain lines, but really check whether a single string fits a pattern.

And then the pattern you are looking for is obvious: either string 1 followed by string 2, or string 2 followed by string 1.

teapot posted:

It checks specifically for those strings, so you have to keep spaces/capitalization/... the same in matching strings and in the file you test. If it returned nothing, it means, nothing matched, otherwise it returns a string that will be the whole file with dashes instead of newlines. For the use in scripts it's more important that return value of grep is 0 if it matched, nonzero if it didn't.

Ahh, it looks like for whatever reason my file had additional spaces in it; must have had something to do with the way I ripped that information .

In any event, they both work, but now I am a little confused as to how I could use this in a conditional. If this criteria is met (the pattern of duration: 2 duration: 3) then do this Else do this.

I have done conditionals for bash scripts before, but they were simple:

code:

if [ "wc -l < file" \> "1"  ]
then
echo "Something"
else
echo "Something Else"
fi

# ? Oct 8, 2007 10:58

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

Crush posted:

Ahh, it looks like for whatever reason my file had additional spaces in it; must have had something to do with the way I ripped that information .

In any event, they both work, but now I am a little confused as to how I could use this in a conditional. If this criteria is met (the pattern of duration: 2 duration: 3) then do this Else do this.

I have done conditionals for bash scripts before, but they were simple:
code:
if [ "wc -l < file" \> "1"  ]
then
echo "Something"
else
echo "Something Else"
fi

code:

if grep something somefile
  then
    echo "Found something"
  else
    echo "Found nothing"
  fi

In your example you forgot backticks arount "wc -l <file", you don't need quotes around numeric values, and \> should bee -gt (it looks like ">" compares strings, so "5" > "100"). So the versio that actually works is:

code:

if [ `wc -l < file` -gt 1 ]
then
echo "Something"
else
echo "Something Else"
fi

"[" is actually a command, and "]" is its last parameter. It's the same as:

code:

if test `wc -l < file` -gt 1 
then
echo "Something"
else
echo "Something Else"
fi

# ? Oct 8, 2007 11:44

Crush: Jan 18, 2004; jot bought me this account, I now have to suck him off.

teapot posted:

code:
if grep something somefile
  then
    echo "Found something"
  else
    echo "Found nothing"
  fi
In your example you forgot backticks arount "wc -l <file", you don't need quotes around numeric values, and \> should bee -gt (it looks like ">" compares strings, so "5" > "100"). So the versio that actually works is:
code:
if [ `wc -l < file` -gt 1 ]
then
echo "Something"
else
echo "Something Else"
fi
"[" is actually a command, and "]" is its last parameter. It's the same as:
code:
if test `wc -l < file` -gt 1 
then
echo "Something"
else
echo "Something Else"
fi

Awesome, thanks to both you and Ilya. Nice tips on the conditionals, too.

# ? Oct 8, 2007 11:54

haunted bong: Jun 24, 2007

Quick question: The WLAN controller I'm using is a Broadcomm, and I followed these directions for installing:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty_No-Fluff

And, as far as I can tell, it installed fine. However, I'm on a wired network right now(No way to check wireless) and I'd like to know if it worked fine. the network manager for GNOME says that wireless is in "roaming mode", but I've never dealt with wireless so I'm unsure as to what that means.

# ? Oct 9, 2007 04:57

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Bubba Ho-Tep posted:

Quick question: The WLAN controller I'm using is a Broadcomm, and I followed these directions for installing:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty_No-Fluff

And, as far as I can tell, it installed fine. However, I'm on a wired network right now(No way to check wireless) and I'd like to know if it worked fine. the network manager for GNOME says that wireless is in "roaming mode", but I've never dealt with wireless so I'm unsure as to what that means.

I'm new to ubuntu, but I had something similar on my laptop. Try commenting out all the interfaces in /etc/network/interfaces except for the loopback. NetworkManager should assume control of your card and you'll be able to use the applet to join a network.

# ? Oct 9, 2007 07:12

Combat Pretzel: Jun 23, 2004; No, seriously... what kurds?!

Installing CentOS5, can you do that straight from the LiveCD (like Ubuntu) or just the first CD of the full distro? I need to create a system archive off it to get a base system, but don't really want to download worth a whole DVD.

# ? Oct 9, 2007 16:08

FasterThanLight: Mar 26, 2003

I just bought a Microsoft VX-3000 because I read that it was supported by the gspca driver and was decent quality. Unfortunately, the colors and saturation seem to be way off:

I did some googling, and found a few people with the same problem, but no fix. Silly me for buying a microsoft product for use in linux, I just figured it was a re-badged version of something else. Anyway, I don't feel like messing around with it anymore, so I'm just going to return it and try another. Can anybody recommend a cheap-ish webcam that works in linux?

# ? Oct 9, 2007 19:01

SnatchRabbit: Feb 23, 2006; by sebmojo

Why are we seeing so many Linux-based mobile devices? I dunno about you guys but I've noticed that everything from Archos PMPs to Open-Moko seem to be running Linux, these days. Maybe it's just a product of all the GoogleOS chatter, but I was curious if anyone knew of any sales figures or patent filings related to this trend?

# ? Oct 9, 2007 20:05

Zuph: Jul 24, 2003; Zupht0r 6000 Turbo Type-R

SnatchRabbit posted:

Why are we seeing so many Linux-based mobile devices? I dunno about you guys but I've noticed that everything from Archos PMPs to Open-Moko seem to be running Linux, these days. Maybe it's just a product of all the GoogleOS chatter, but I was curious if anyone knew of any sales figures or patent filings related to this trend?

A quick google brings up some smartphone figures:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8804000399.html

Other figured are slightly more elusive.

A lot of this is because Linux is free and open source. It's easy to get working on a lot of different hardware platforms.

# ? Oct 9, 2007 20:36

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

SnatchRabbit posted:

Why are we seeing so many Linux-based mobile devices? I dunno about you guys but I've noticed that everything from Archos PMPs to Open-Moko seem to be running Linux, these days. Maybe it's just a product of all the GoogleOS chatter, but I was curious if anyone knew of any sales figures or patent filings related to this trend?

Because mobile devices now have enough resources to support a modern general-purpose OS, but still have to keep UI and storage space use from requiring giant screens and huge drives like desktop software does. The only two alternatives other than semi-embedded Linux (usually with Qt) for that purpose are Windows Mobile and Symbian, both inferior on modern CPUs, and both proprietary with rather primitive user interface. Oh, and whatever BSD derivative that Apple uses on iPhone, however this is the closest thing to Linux without being Linux, and Apple won't license it anyway.

# ? Oct 9, 2007 20:38

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teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

FasterThanLight posted:

I just bought a Microsoft VX-3000 because I read that it was supported by the gspca driver and was decent quality. Unfortunately, the colors and saturation seem to be way off:

I did some googling, and found a few people with the same problem, but no fix. Silly me for buying a microsoft product for use in linux, I just figured it was a re-badged version of something else. Anyway, I don't feel like messing around with it anymore, so I'm just going to return it and try another. Can anybody recommend a cheap-ish webcam that works in linux?

Your camera is out of focus. Adjust it.

# ? Oct 9, 2007 20:39

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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