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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yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

I'll start with something easy.

Anyone got a recommendation for a simple terminal emulator to interface with a serial port. I'm looking for something like HyperTerminal, except console based and not a piece of poo poo. I'm using Xfce's Terminal and don't want to install all of gnome or kde's dependencies. I sort of got it working with screen, but I feel like I'm missing some basic program that everyone's been using for 20 years.

So, you guys got anything for me?

# ¿ Mar 21, 2007 20:00

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 19:26

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

xdice posted:

minicom. Runs in an xterm, or on a console, and so on and so on. I've used it for console connections to routers and switches over serial for years, and seems to come by default with just about every distro I've looked at in the past couple years.

Every distro except gentoo. minicom looks perfect, thanks!

# ¿ Mar 21, 2007 20:58

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

JoeNotCharles posted:

terminal stuff

xfce4's Terminal is a nice little program. It uses GTK2 and offers a few features like tabs while still staying light.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2007 04:05

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Kaluza-Klein posted:

Can some one help me using RAW camera images with linux?

I want to have a very simple way to convert RAW images to JPEG with the click of a button. I have UFRaw which can batch convert images on the command line. Turning that into a little script seems simple enough.

I cannot figure out what values to use for all the settings so that it will spit out a JPEG that is identical (or as close as it possible) to what my camera would have produced. Is this possible?

I tried just using all the defaults, but that produces a jpg that is less than half the size of what my camera normally produces. And it is much darker than the original NEF file.

My camera is a Nikon D40 and I have previously been saving file in jpg Fine mode. I can't even figure out what the compression on the jpeg files is. They seem to be different for every photo.

Thank you for any help. I just want to be able to quickly send stuff off to Flickr, and for that they need to be in jpeg (or tiff I guess) format.

You should run the standalone 'ufraw' command. It has a GTK interface you can check and set all your options with. There is also a gimp import plugin if you want to use that. Once you got it configured with some good defaults, you can export the configuration and use it with ufraw-batch.

I'm not sure if your Nikon has a similar feature, but my camera is an Olympus and I find it easier to just use it in RAW+JPG mode. I treat the jpegs as I would a snapshot and throw on flickr or send to a friend and only get into the raws if I need to.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2007 21:42

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Kaluza-Klein posted:

I was thinking of using thr RAW+JPG feature, but that would create a lot of extra data that I will never use. If I snap 100 photos, I may only throw 1 or 2 on Flickr. That is a lot of jpg's sitting around just taking up space.

Defaults is kind of a subjective term though, isn't it? Settings that make one output jpeg look like the input raw will not necessarily work across the board. At least that is the way it is looking to me. Maybe what I am trying to do just isn't a possibility?

You're right. There's only so much the software can do with the defaults. Try having as many of the settings in ufraw as auto or camera and go from there. Your camera has to do a similar operation when it creates the jpeg, so it should be possible to get some settings that approximate it. No matter what though, it'll never be a totally hands off job.

edit:
I just gave it a shot and it works pretty well for me.

code:

ufraw --wb=camera --base-curve=camera --black-point=auto --exposure=auto Photos/Raw/pb271246.orf

The only problem was it's a picture with a lot of snow and so the camera compensated by underexposing it. The camera jpg and my converted raw file look pretty similar, but with either of them I would want to adjust the exposure setting manually before putting it on flickr.

yippee cahier fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Mar 25, 2007

# ¿ Mar 25, 2007 23:24

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Lynxifer posted:

I've used Linux off and on over the past three years (once I got passed my fuckkk w1inblowz, qq GAYtes stage) I've settled onto Ubuntu.

I recently liberated an old 40GB harddrive and revived my old Ubuntu headless server.

I was wondering if anyone knows of a internet streaming radio solution that fits my needs. I would like something that plays MP3's (I don't really care about ogg vorbis support, I'm not THAT open sauce) that you can listen to with VLC, Winamp or whatever, but instead of having to create playlists, you can just tell it to play everything in a certain folder and be done with it.
I've looked at ICEcast2 which I couldn't get to work at all, and right now I can kind of cobble SHOUTcast to do my bidding, but I find it very messy and if another solutions exists I would drop it in a heartbeat.

I think mpd will stream to icecast, meaning you'd be able to run any of the mpd clients to build playlists (CLI,GUI,WWW) from anywhere.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2007 18:12

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

PsychoCowboy posted:

I've just installed and am running xfce 4.3.99.1 on xubuntu 6.10 and none of the desktop icons are showing up, File Manger/Home and so on. What can i do to fix this?

Menu > Settings > Desktop Settings > Behavior tab > Desktop Icons dropdown box

Honestly, this should be the default.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2007 19:41

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

spfdz posted:

Looking for a media player that can support 6000+ songs in a playlist, and can submit tracks to last.fm, as well read idv3 tags.

Amarok chuggs on a playlist that's that big. Anyone have any suggestions?

My experience with xmms is that it doesn't read the tags correctly.

I just added 7K to my mpd playlist, took about a second. No chugging here. I use a GTK2 client, but there's some Qt ones you can take a look at.

There's a separate daemon client called mpdscribble that will submit info to last.fm

# ¿ Apr 2, 2007 17:29

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

spfdz posted:

So wait, mpd = command line player? Seems the mpd website is down, I wante to check screenshots

It's Music Player Daemon, debug info is all you'll get on the command line. They have various clients that connect to it to provide command line, gui and web interfaces. There's quite a few clients out there, so if you don't like the look and feel of one, you can switch to another. I'm using Sonata, which is clean but pretty slick. Here's a screenshot ripped off of their webpage:

# ¿ Apr 3, 2007 01:09

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

minute posted:

Well, I finally got MPD installed. I want to create a launcher for sonata on my panel, but I can't find the icon for sonata. Is there a way to find icons for various programs?

/usr/share/pixmaps on gentoo.

or...

# ¿ Apr 18, 2007 15:58

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

minute posted:

A couple more quick questions. Right now, I have WinXP installed on partition, Xubuntu on a partition and a shared FAT32 partition. I have all my music on the FAT partition. I tried adding a symbolic link to my music folder in /var/lib/mpd/music. It seems to work, I can cd into it, etc. But when I try to run sudo mpd --create-db, it won't add anything to the database. I think it has something to do with the permissions. Right now, the permissions for that partition are: drwxrwx---. I tried doing sudo chmod a+rwx, and that didn't do anything. I tried actually changing into the superuser and running chmod and still didn't do anything. Also, all the files in that partition are listed in green in terminal. I have an external harddisk also formatted as FAT32 which seems to work fine. The permissions for that are: drwxr-xr-x. I can add a symbolic link to my music directory on there and mpd adds it to the database with no problem.

Another thing, can MPD play CDs? Do I just make a symbolic link to /media/cdrom in /var/lib/mpd/music? And, can MPD access freedb?

I just rip my CDs and update the database. I would suspect it can't. As for the other issue, the short, quick, and dirty solution is to run mpd as root while you find a better fix (mounting the partition as owned by mpd, or adding the mpd user to a group that owns the mounted partition. look into fstab options) just comment out the line in /etc/mpd.conf that sets the user to mpd.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2007 03:58

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

AlexHat posted:

No-one knows about the Zen player, huh? Well, has anyone had any luck install EVE Online then? I can install it, but when I try to run it the splash screen comes on, and then goes to what I assume is the menu as the screen is all black. I can hear the music though...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_ZEN#Other_related_software

I had eve going recently. Different wine releases can break certain things so I can't really help you on version numbers. If you're running a 3d desktop, try disabling it before playing, make sure you're accelerated (glxinfo | grep "direct"), try another wine version.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2007 16:19

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

RiSK posted:

Is there an easy way to see what devices are hooked upped to USB?

Long story short; I just bought a UPS with auto shutdown software. The Linux version of the software is asking me where the UPS's connection is.. well, connected. It's hooked up to USB, so I need to find out what /dev/tty* it is connected to. (If that's even correct in the first place.)

lsusb provides USB related information, dmesg will probably tell you what tty it's attaching to.

# ¿ May 20, 2007 08:00

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

RiSK posted:

hiddev96: USB HID v1.10 Device [APC Back-UPS ES 350 FW:823.B1.D USB FW:B1] on usb-0000:00:1f.2-1

From that, can you determine the tty it's attached to?

Ok the hiddev driver is claiming it and assigning it to hiddev96. Your UPS is not connected to a tty, it's accessed directly through the usb hid layer. A command like this should give you the path to the device node:

ls -lR /dev | grep hiddev96

But after doing a little more searching, this information seems unnecessary. This site should be useful to you:
http://www.apcupsd.org/manual/Configuration_Examples.html#SECTION000131000000000000000

quote:

If you have a USB UPS, and you have apcupsd version 3.10.7 (3.10.17a for *BSD) or higher, the essential elements of your apcupsd.conf file should look like the following:
code:
     ## apcupsd.conf v1.1 ##
     UPSCABLE usb
     UPSTYPE usb
     DEVICE
     LOCKFILE /var/lock
     UPSCLASS standalone
     UPSMODE disable
Notice that we have not specified a device. In doing so, apcupsd will try all the well known USB ports. We strongly recommend you use this (empty device address) form unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.

Please use the explicit specifications of a device only if you know exactly what you are doing. In general, it is much easier to let apcupsd find the device itself.

Since it autodetects the device node, if something goes wrong with udev one day and your UPC gets assigned to hiddev97 it should still work.

yippee cahier fucked around with this message at 01:45 on May 21, 2007

# ¿ May 21, 2007 01:43

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Pididdle27 posted:

Real easy question here, Im at work and I use Debian Linux. I am trying to get the names of some devices. When I use dmesg it spits out a long rear end list. I tried using the more but it does not work. How do I get it to pause the info so I can read it one page at a time. Please PM me the answer.

If it's real easy, we should post it in here so others can learn too. I think "dmesg | less" is what you're looking for because lol less is more. I always forget about this stuff and hold shift to scroll up through the buffer with the arrows or pageup.

# ¿ May 22, 2007 16:51

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Tipps posted:

I've been running Ubuntu 7.04 on this laptop here for about a month, and everything's been going more or less smoothly since. There's just one thing that been bugging me. Ever since I installed it, my speakers have been really really lovely. I dont know if it's because my sound card is incompatible with it or something, but even with the volume at 100% the sound can barely be heard. It's more of an annoyance than anything else, but if there's a way to fix it that would be cool too

Open a terminal and run alsamixer. Chances are you're only adjusting one of the master or PCM mixers. Crank them both up, but don't go over 0dB or you'll have the other end of the lovely sound spectrum.

# ¿ May 25, 2007 00:16

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Tipps posted:

I can't seem to adjust the master sound output, and the PCM is at 0db, but the sound still barely trickles out.

Is there an external amplifier off the right hand side you can unmute? (m key) Laptops or computers with speakers built in sometimes require this.

# ¿ May 26, 2007 03:37

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

Yeah, I wish they were though. There's something so romantic about the whole thing. I know a lot of it was just the placebo effect, but everyone really believed that their gentoo install was so amazingly fast. I'm sure the real gains were microscopic (hence eliminating stage 1 entirely), but drat what a cool idea.

They stopped supporting them because it was a headache. These days the exact same thing can be accomplished by running 'emerge -e system' on a stage 3 system. The only other purported benefit is being able to set your CHOST value before compiling everything, but it appears that you can change that if you want as long as you follow some instructions: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_change_CHOST_relatively_safely

# ¿ May 30, 2007 07:18

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

MrTheDevious posted:

Any ideas on how to fix this without having to completely reinstall?

Checked the mixer settigns and unmuted your PCM and master channels?

# ¿ Jun 9, 2007 03:02

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

VERTiG0 posted:

I was thinking of Xubuntu but that looks to be for systems even shittier than this.

Thoughts?

Xubuntu runs fine on my 1.8 GHz Opteron. XFCE isn't just for lovely systems. Is there any functionality benefit of running a full gnome install? Personally, I don't see one.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2007 05:50

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Toiletbrush posted:

I'm currently trying to compile Thunderbird for my system, because I need to do this to actually build goddamn Enigmail.

Anyhow, I downloaded the source of release 2.0.0.4, yet this build script requires CVS, to update exactly nothing, apart from downloading two Makefiles that for some reason weren't included. What's the loving point of this poo poo? I couldn't find an explanation for this anywhere.

What distro are you using that doesn't have a package manager?

# ¿ Jun 21, 2007 16:22

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Christobevii3 posted:

I'm in a linux class right now and covering bash commands. One of my assignments is asking me to do this:

Edit the bashrc file so that when you type "hello" and press enter into the command line that it will reply "how are you?". It suggests using the echo command. I am not getting enough information from the class though to figure out how to do this. Can someone point me in the right direction or just help me?

Try reading the man page for 'alias'.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2007 20:40

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Skillo posted:

So I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 and installed aMSN.

Downloaded a skin for it, the instructions told me to extract it to (quoting from memory, I'm not near the Linux machine now) /usr/skillo/aMsn/skins

Problem is, it won't let me copy anything to that folder. It says I don't have permission. Since I don't think I know any way to login as root, is there anything I can do to copy the files there?

If it's just you on the system, another option might be putting the skin in your user folder. Do you have a ~/.amsn/skins directory or something similar? Sorry, I use pidgin, I can't be of much help.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2007 04:46

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

rotor posted:

Can someone with SATA functioning properly under linux name the motherboard/card/chipset they're using? edit: and kernel version, I guess?

I have had zero luck with cheap Silicon Image cards, and the nicer ones are super expensive. It might be easier to get a cheapo nforce board if the nforce4 sata drivers are stable in linux.

My nforce4 works great, as did the jmicron and uli chipsets on my previous motherboard. Up to date kernel in all cases.

Does the latest ubuntu livecd recognize your disks at all?

# ¿ Jul 3, 2007 19:32

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

JoeNotCharles posted:

Too lazy to look this up right now - can I format a filesystem to NTFS with NTFS-3G, or do I need Windows for that? I've got some old disks lying around that I'm thinking of throwing in a USB enclosure and turning my roommate's Mac into a file server, and I figure I might as well keep it Windows-compatible for when friends bring laptops over.

With samba, every filesystem is Windows/Mac/Linux compatible. That's how I ended up going when I wanted to do something similar.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2007 21:34

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

JoeNotCharles posted:

So I can plug a USB drive into a Windows machine, no matter what filesystem is on it, and... mount it through Samba? What?

I know technically all I need is a Mac-readable filesystem, but what if the Mac breaks down (it's a G3, pretty old) or my entire network goes down or something? I'm just looking for flexibility.

Share it via samba from one of your computers and everyone can use it over the network simultaneously and without swapping USB cables.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2007 19:13

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

JoeNotCharles posted:

I know technically all I need is a Mac-readable filesystem, but what if the Mac breaks down (it's a G3, pretty old) or my entire network goes down or something? I'm just looking for flexibility.

Yeah yeah, NTFS through fuse should be good. I was just making sure the most convenient day-to-day use option was out there.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2007 05:40

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

bobthenameless posted:

So I'm trying to get dual monitors to work in Ubuntu 7.04, and it's being a huge pain. It's a fresh install, and all I've done is update the nvidia drivers with their program which is supposed to generate a working xorg.conf file (http://pastey.net/70881). However, whenever ubuntu boots up I can hear the startup sound, but both monitors act as if they have no signal. If I change the driver from nvidia -> nv it works fine, but dual monitors isn't working with that either. I'm using a Geforce 6800 with DVI -> LCD and VGA -> CRT.

This is really frustrating, as with ubuntu 6.10 it was really simple for me to get this set up going

Any help is appreciated

This looks like it might have some more options to set:
http://www.ublug.org/ubuntu/twinview/twinview-howto-breezy.html

Basically, use twinview over xinerama. Define your metamodes and maybe read near the end of your /var/log/Xorg.0.log (if that's where ubuntu puts it) to look for more clues.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2007 06:50

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

MrTheDevious posted:

I have a question regarding wget. I'm trying to snag a few gigs of zip files from a government setup. They're divided into subdirectories based on state, which you can see here:

http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/tiger2006se/

I need to grab each of those zip files out of each subdirectory and NOTHING ELSE on the site. Everything I try backs up and starts at /geo/ and snags stuff I don't care about. Help

This seems to work for me:

code:

wget -r -np --accept=.ZIP [url]http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/tiger2006se/[/url]

-r for recursive, -np for no parent, --accept=.ZIP to grab your zips. It takes a little while to get going as it parses the directory listings, but I got a few alaska zips before bailing out.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2007 17:59

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Skalenol posted:

I'm running Feisty with an Nvidia 7950GT graphics card, the drivers are installed and everything works fine, compiz fusion running and everything. I just got a new widescreen monitor and it's recognized by nvidia-settings, but every time X is restarted, it reverts the resolution to 1440x900, down from the 1680x1050 it should be at, requiring me to manually change it every time I restart.

I've saved the configuration to my xorg.conf through nvidia-settings, and also tried editing in the resolution manually, neither of which have worked. How do I fix this?

My xorg.conf.

You put 1680x1050 as the first mode in your monitor section of that xorg.conf and it didn't work?

# ¿ Aug 8, 2007 05:49

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

jstultz posted:

Second question; I noticed that the sound quality on my mp3s is seriously lacking. I haven't noticed any quality issues while watching videos, but sound from music is very scratchy, as if the signal is clipped, and it seems to sound the same on any program I run it with. Could this just be the result of a lovely decoder or what? It's odd, I'm sure that the files themselves are fine, as they sounded fine when I play them on my ipod or in itunes in windows. Ideas?

If it is clipping, try to lower your PCM mixer volume in alsamixer. Sometimes it's helpful and shows a gain in positive dBs, in that case, lower it to 0dB. Sometimes you have to guess. 74% is 0dB for me.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2007 08:33

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

invid posted:

By on the fly, I meant with the "/" still mounted.

I guess its not possible, after searching around Looks like I've to get a new HDD just to mount /vz.

gparted has a livecd you can use.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2007 23:56

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

The Remote Viewer posted:

I think I'll stop replying to you since you think you know everything. You've made a ton of assumptions about things you think that I did or didn't do. You're not really being a good advocate for the OS when you talk to down to someone that had problems with it.

Sure, teapot was snarky, but there's a difference between "need help getting AAC decoding going" and "tried to rice out my system without knowing anything about it; linux sucks".

# ¿ Aug 23, 2007 02:25

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

On an unrelated note, any recommendations for a distro for running a home server from? My plan is to have a CF card with the root filesystem on it, and a RAID of disks for NAS. I don't want to burn out my CF card with too many writes, so the idea is mounting /var on a ramdisk or hopefully all of / read-only. I was wondering if there was something tailored to this task, with a modern package manager, but still a light, text based system.

I have done a linux from scratch deal on a CF card before, but it's a little tedious building each package or popping the card into a workstation to change a line in a config file.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2007 02:47

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

deimos posted:

not linux but FreeNAS will do what you want.

I want to do mpd, asterisk and maybe myth-backend on the same machine eventually, so a general purpose distro would be better suited. Thanks though.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2007 04:36

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

I actually think I might go with gentoo. I already use it on my desktop, so I'm comfortable with it.

At first I thought I would just build stripped down binary packages with portage and transfer them onto flash, but thinking about that reminded me that they have a LiveCD building utility. Perfect for a relatively read-only device. Can someone tell me what directories need to be rw on flash? Just /etc?

# ¿ Aug 23, 2007 20:01

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Contero posted:

Yeah, time for contero to fill up the thread with all his retarded newbie questions.

I installed Ubuntu on my laptop. It's very pretty and I like it. I thought it would be a good place to start.

Now I want to get xemacs and start using it as an editor. I went to their site, downloaded the latest .tar.gz and put it in my home directory. I read all the instructions on the website and the instructions inside the tarball. I pretty much got stuck trying to run ./configure where it says "gcc cannot create executeables".

Any idea why? I'm pretty sure I could just use ubuntu's "add program" menu and get GNU Emacs, but I want to figure out how to run all the makefile fun stuff.

You probably need the build-essential package from the package manager. While you're installing that, select xemacs as well.

It's cool you want to dive in and do it by hand, but personally, I think a package manager is the #1 reason to use linux over another OS.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2007 03:47

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Leathal posted:

Halp.

Just making sure you updated /etc/fstab too, right?

# ¿ Aug 26, 2007 21:43

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Jo posted:

I (found ) and fired up the system performance monitor supplied by KDE. I didn't notice it at first, but it looks like my kernel only recognizes 1 gig of RAM out of the two I have installed. Is there a way to verify this in another application? Memtest will tell me, I think, but I'd like to run something from inside the OS to rule out a configuration problem.

Fake Edit: It reads two gigs on POST.

Run 'free' in a terminal and read the man page if that's not enough.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2007 01:44

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 19:26

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

deong posted:

What is the best MP3 IDv3 tag editor for Linux?. On windows I was using Tag&Rename, and I like how it can grab from directory names and such. I have tried out MusicBrainz Piccard, and while it is nice, its more complicated that i feel is needed. The process of Fingerprinting the files seems unnecessary.
What are other favorites?

I use easytag, which is great. Supports a bunch of formats, embeds images, you name it. The interface is a tiny bit quirky, but it's still gtk2. If you can interactively write out a string of how your directories files are arranged, it'll tell you what ID3 fields are being interpreted.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2007 03:55

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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