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

PFC.Spengler posted:

Can someone reccomend me a distro for a 200mhz laptop? drat small works fine but I'm wondering what else is out there. Just need a web browser, text editor, window manager, etc.

Arch is really really fast. If you're comfortable configuring it, I'd go for it.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2007 03:50

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 16:36

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

evilmonkeh posted:

I'm thinking about buying a laser printer for my house. I'm going to connect it to my ubuntu-server box, but Is there any simple way of sharing over the network but also keeping some record of how many pages each person has printed?

CUPS will log all jobs you send it, based on username. The web interface is pretty nice, but there's also text logs in /var/log/cups/ you can grep and linecount.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2007 15:41

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

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

rikshot posted:

I'm trying to install Gentoo on my HP Compaq 6820s laptop and it won't create the eth0 network interface even though lspci lists the network card/chip correctly and the e1000 module is loaded correctly.

Anyone have any tips to solve this? Is it even possible to install Gentoo on this laptop?

I recently switched from gentoo.

What you have to do is copy or make a symbolic link to /etc/init.d/net.lo called /etc/init.d/net.eth0

The init scripts will create an interface with that name and by default use DHCP unless specified differently in /etc/conf.d/net

Oh yeah, don't forget to run

code:

rc-update add net.eth0 default

# ¿ Oct 12, 2007 15:32

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Deezul posted:

Is the numbering of the harddrives based off the boot order in the bios or some other way?

I think by default it is when grub is installed.

Read this:
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Device-map.html

# ¿ Oct 13, 2007 17:40

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

teapot posted:

It is the device numbering in BIOS, what may or may not be the same as boot order. BIOS may have its own opinion of what device is where, and OS is usually completely unaware of it. Fortunately GRUB allows to edit its arguments when choosing them from the menu (press 'e' to edit entry, choose a line and 'e' again to edit a line within the entry, <Enter> to finish, 'b' to boot). So if you get your devices wrong, manually edit them while in GRUB menu, then write the configuration file with whatever happened to be correct.

grub has tab completion too, so the partitions/files on a drive can help you find the right one to use.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2007 21:15

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Silvyn posted:

I have an nVidia card setup for Twinview. Presently fullscreen apps and splash screens will show up centered between each display. But programs like Firefox will show up on one display or the other.

I'd like a way so that fullscreen applications by default showed up on a single display. I read on another forum that this can be accomplished by setting up two different displays, but you can't drag windows between the two. If possible I'd like to be able to maintain the ability of dragging between displays while still solving the problem. Is this possible?

I would like to do something similar. I have a single screen, but it has a 16:10 aspect ratio and I'd like to be able to maximize to either side. Sort of like having two xinerama displays on a single monitor. I've seen utilities for Windows that do this, so I'm sure there's a bit of demand. Does anyone know how to do this? I'm using compiz as my window manager.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2007 15:57

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

hooah posted:

I'm using Ubuntu 7.10, and it doesn't seem to be able to recognize my NTFS drive. I tried the command you gave me, but the terminal said I can only do that from root. I tried figuring out how to get to root, but to no avail.

Run the same command, throwing a "sudo " before it. Boom, it's running as root.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2007 23:46

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

dorkface posted:

FTDI ICs are in everything. Their driver code is in tree as well. Every modern distro should support this device out of the box. have you checked dmesg after connecting the device?

My FTDI device shows up as /dev/ttyUSB0, but we may have different udev versions. Worked fine in minicom.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2007 01:32

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

chizad posted:

And if for some reason it doesn't, your BIOS may provide a less elegant but workable solution. Mine lets me specify multiple HDs in the boot order, and combined with the "select boot device" key provides a ghetto way to boot between multiple OSes installed in different drives.

I actually think that's a more elegant way. Every drive has its own bootloader so you can pull your ubuntu drive and have windows come up without reinstalling the MBR.

\/\/\/
I think windows assigns letters by partition starting at primary master to secondary slave. Just install it on the primary master drive first and it should get assigned C:. You can leave the other drives in and should have them all in when you install ubuntu.

Shouldn't matter. Even if one was a slave, you wouldn't be using the master on that channel if you booted the OS of the slave.

yippee cahier fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Nov 5, 2007

# ¿ Nov 5, 2007 06:46

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

dorkface posted:

Ok, I'm trying to get my usb to serial converter to work with minicom (cables unlimited), and after many days of troubleshooting, I think I may have found the problem. After checking dmesg and lsusb, the operating system seems to notice it, however, when I look into the /dev directory, there isn't a ttyUSB*, which minicom needs in order to use the converter.

The cable packaging says that it supports linux 2.4, but I don't know if they've given up on supporting it or not.

Also, I've looked on google, and the only answer I could find is to put "CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_FTDI_SIO=Y" somewhere and recompile the kernal. Unfortuantely, I have no idea how to do this. Any suggestions?

What distro are you using?

Can you check lsmod and see if the kernel is loading the ftdi module?

edit:
If the kernel is loading the driver and not just detecting a USB device plug/unplug event, you may have to create the /dev/ttyUSB0 device yourself. Google tells me the command is 'mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0'

my module loading:

code:

usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial
usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for generic
usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
usb-serial.c: USB Serial Driver core
usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for FTDI USB Serial Device
usbcore: registered new interface driver ftdi_sio
ftdi_sio.c: v1.4.3:USB FTDI Serial Converters Driver

yippee cahier fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Nov 12, 2007

# ¿ Nov 12, 2007 05:33

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

You're apparently not using a distro and you're getting long goofy error messages. How can I help you with this, seriously?

Can you 'modprobe ftdi_sio' and tell me if dmesg picks that up?

# ¿ Nov 12, 2007 06:21

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

dorkface posted:

I'm using kubuntu 7.10. I've already did modprobe ftdi_sio some time ago, so I won't be able to tell you what it says.

I haven't been able to reload that module since I'm getting the aforementioned errors. I'd post what it says, but I don't want to take up a page just for that.

Do you mind booting the kubuntu livecd, plugging in your device and checking dmesg? This module has worked out of the box for me without fail and I wonder if your manual installation steps overwrote the provided kernel module.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2007 02:56

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

dorkface posted:

Woah, sweet, after booting up and removing brltty, it actually worked! Thanks! But, how am I able to fix the original installation, by backing up and reformatting, or is there a less drastic measure?

Maybe try reinstalling/upgrading your linux-ubuntu-modules package in the package manager. I'm really at a loss at this point. I'm coming from using a gentoo system, so apt and ubuntu are somewhat new.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2007 04:39

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Ok, speccing out a new laptop: Is Intel Turbo Memory ("robson") supported in Linux? I don't mean the Vista prefetching stuff, just if I can see it like any other block device. Anyone have one and stick /boot on it or use it as swap? Is it worth the couple extra dollars?

# ¿ Nov 18, 2007 06:28

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Mr. Banana Grabber posted:

I feel like such an idiot asking this but can I get some help installing flashplayer? I have it downloaded on my desktop as a .tar and I extracted it to the same place. The website says that I need to navigate to the file and run a command through the terminal but I have no idea how to navigate to a file in the terminal.

Most distros have it in the package manager. What are you using?

# ¿ Dec 12, 2007 05:17

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Hey guys, got my new T61 today and promptly deleted Vista. Does anyone have experience using USB security dongles in a guest OS using this fancy virtualization stuff? Am I dreaming or is this sort of thing possible?

# ¿ Dec 14, 2007 06:05

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Alowishus posted:

Specifically which fancy virtualization stuff? You're running Windows virtualized on Linux? Many of the virtualization solutions can pass USB devices through, so it's potentially possible.

Intel VT-x. Right now I'm investigating if running Windows as a guest is going to be feasible.

What's the generally accepted best choice for software? It looks like QEMU supports USB passthrough so I guess QEMU and the in-kernel KVM? I've only ever briefly played around with VMware in the past so I'm pretty new to this.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2007 06:31

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Marinmo posted:

What the flying gently caress happened to gentoos packages database? Previously it was a nicely laid out page with a very handy searchbox where you could search for individual packages. Now it's just an abortion of what it previously was. Does anyone know how to use that drat page (I don't consider browsing by category as an option), or even better, if there's an search tool for packages available somewhere on the gentoo.org site?

I am aware of using /package/packagename - that is not what I want.

Big security flaw on their site, but that was a long time ago now. I'm surprised it's still down.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2007 20:39

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Cheesus posted:

I recently re-installed my media player's OS from Redhat 7 to Ubuntu Server (whatever is current). It's a headless system without any desktop.

The one thing I cannot figure out is how to detect the insertion of an audio CD. I think I have udev setup correctly but inserting the CD doesn't trigger any kind of event.

Under the RedHat7 system, I hacked either KDE or Gnome's autorun program that apparently watched the insertion of CD and launched my ripper. I'd rather do it "correctly" if that's possible.

I've spent the better part of two hours googling for various combinations of "linux", "detect", "audio cd" and can't come up with anything.

Surely there's a way to do this?

Gnome (KDE too?) use D-Bus and HAL to detect the CD drive's events. Back on gentoo and before it got adopted across the board, I used ivman to mount my usb key on insertion. The homepage mentions it functions as a generic HAL message handler:
http://ivman.sourceforge.net/

The configuration files have examples for launching different programs if the media is a DVD, etc.

I don't know if it's considered the best or even an elegant solution, but it beats having some script polling your drive every few seconds. Also, I don't know if Ubuntu server has some first party app doing exactly what it does running already.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2008 04:57

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

I'm looking for the ideal xorg input configuration for my laptop. I have a touchpad and trackpoint that are obviously going to always be connected to my system. I also would like to have any USB mouse to use the new input hotplug feature and work with all the buttons so I can borrow a mouse wherever I go.

My strategy is to write udev rules to alias my touchpad and trackpoint to permanent device names. I tried using the /dev/input/mouseX symlinks, but they get reordered if I have the USB mouse connected when I boot. I want these separate from other mice so I can configure scrolling behavior differently than a "real" mouse. Is this the best method for accomplishing this?

Finally, I'd like any number of USB mice to just work with input hotplug. I'm using the evdev driver right now because it handles the buttons best, but I have to make a new InputDevice section for each mouse. Is there anyway to tell xorg to use the evdev driver for any unconfigured input device using wildcards or something?

Anyone do anything similar and have some tips as to how xorg works?

# ¿ Jan 8, 2008 18:07

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Anunnaki posted:

Just a small question: After a few mishaps with installing Linux, I've ended up installing/re-installing Linux 4 times, and I think as a result, my GRUB loader is loading slow. Where it was near instantaneous to get to the OS options before, now it takes ~5 seconds to load. Once I get to that point, everything boots up and performs just as normal. Anyone know if there's a way to fix that, or why it might be doing it in the first place?

What filesystem is your boot partition on? I noticed things are slightly slower if it's a more complex one. Grub could also be trying to probe for a non-existent floppy drive or something. Check your device.map file too.

edit: \/\/\/
ReiserFS was always a bit slower than ext3 for grub, but mine doesn't pause for 5 seconds. Is your BIOS boot order causing your system to spin up a non-boot cd sitting in a drive or something weird like that?

yippee cahier fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Jan 15, 2008

# ¿ Jan 14, 2008 18:50

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

JoeNotCharles posted:

I'd recommend Xubuntu, because it uses XFCE which is a more light-weight desktop than Gnome or KDE. (It probably won't do stuff like power management or automatically detecting and mounting USB devices as well, but it sounds like you don't care much about that.)

XFCE handles automounting USB devices just fine.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2008 12:55

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

MrChupon posted:

Everytime I bitch about my hardware difficulties on Linux, people often say I should research the hardware ahead of time for compatibility. Well today I finally have that chance to make an informed purchase! The internal wireless on my laptop has managed to fry itself, so I'm in the market for a PCMCIA Wireless-N card, and I'd like to make sure it works easily on linux.

I know its a somewhat obscure item with most people having built-in wireless these days, but any brand recommendations? Any good sites where I might be able to find out the linux compatibility status of various cards?

If it doesn't exist, I suppose I'd consider a USB dongle type Wireless N adapter, but I'm not too keen on having something protruding from the laptop like that.

You can probably access your old network card through a panel on the back of your laptop and replace it, opening up your choices a little if the card frying didn't take other components with it.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2008 17:57

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

fourwood posted:

NVidia's driver contains its own Xinerama extension, so I believe this shouldn't be an issue.

Thanks to you both for the help. I managed to fix it by explicitly turning on TwinView in xorg.conf. I guess turning it on in nvidia-settings is slightly less than perfect. But now everything is centered on my primary monitor, just like it should be.

When you first turn it on, it won't take effect until you restart your xorg session, which is maybe what caused the problem.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2008 05:44

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Quod Libet has a powerful search function and a variety of interface modes.

You also might want to check out a mpd based solution. You can have various programs access the server via command line to say set up your multimedia keys on your keyboard, or access the server over the network -- there's even web clients. It just takes a little longer to set up and the clients aren't as fully featured as some standalone music players.

Another shot is foobar under wine. Wine is pretty awesome these days, and it can't hurt to give it a shot. Don't stop trying out various native applications if you go this route though.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2008 14:51

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Blaster of Justice posted:

OK, you made me install Banshee. I'm having a real hard time trying to figure out what it can do for me that Amarok can't do better?

It's not that I dislike Banshee or anything, but so far it hasn't convinced me that Amarok isn't the best media player ever coded.

Test1: Organizing a 227GB MP3 trash directory on an external USB HDD.
Amarok: 8 minutes including album arrangements and cute cover pictures.
Banshee: 22 minutes and things are organized like poo poo.

Bonus points for Amarok: UI isn't ugly as gently caress and the playback quality to my ears is way better than anything else I've tried.

If mp3s sound better using different applications there is something wrong with your system or your ears. That being said, I gave banshee a shot and it choked on a bunch of files with "mpeg audio header not found". The import folder structure selection has a drop down list list with a few options, but no method of defining my own. It's itunes for linux I guess, but I'm going to need it to be more powerful to ditch a standalone ripper, tagger, player and burner.

# ¿ May 1, 2008 14:41

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

covener posted:

That's what 'X' should do. You want 'startx'

or startxfce4

# ¿ May 5, 2008 17:45

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Another sound related question:

I'm deaf in one ear and listening to music with headphones is driving me nuts when an instrument is mixed to only one channel. There's sometimes ways of specifying mono output for applications, but not always. What would I do on a Ubuntu 8.04 system to downmix everything? Basically, I never want to hear stereo again.

# ¿ May 13, 2008 06:52

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

So is xen pretty awesome? I'm just using virtualbox right now because it was simple, but it's slower than the vmware trial I did. Is the accelerated 3D support reasonably fast? I like having compiz, but don't play any intensive games. Which direction do you see the virtualization world going for desktop/workstation users?

# ¿ May 17, 2008 17:11

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Normal users do not install/uninstall programs many times a day.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2008 04:34

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Hey Casao, do you find an Add/Remove applications button that can actually add software infuriating and perplexing too?

# ¿ Jun 20, 2008 06:08

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

What separator should I be using so Quod Libet doesn't clutter up the People list? I have a few albums tagged where different permutations of band members are credited for writing the song, making a single album add 10 entries to the People list. Commas, semicolons and slashes don't seem to work.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2008 08:12

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

almostkorean posted:

I think grep returns newline characters after every match. Try appending one to your "ether 01:02:03:04:05:06" string.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2008 18:43

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

pukeduke posted:

I have an old Hauppage USBLive device, which converts the yellow RCA-type cable to USB. Can I use this to see the video feed on linux? I can't seem to find anything...

What shows up when you plug it in and run 'lsusb'? Find a program that can capture from a V4L device and give it a shot to see if it's detected.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2008 08:25

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Bonus posted:

Hey, if anyone is interested, I found a cool little app called mpd which is basically a music server daemon and then i got a frontend for it called ncmpcpp. It's really cool cause ncmpcpp is just what I was looking for and I can also control mpd straight from the commandline or from a Firefox extension. It also has gapless playback and the library organization feature works great.

To anyone interested, there are a couple GUI frontends that are pretty similar to other library-based media player applications and available in Gtk and Qt. mpd is a pretty neat little program that would be perfect in a media server environment.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2008 02:40

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

ZZZorcerer posted:

Thanks, it's my first time using linux at home so I'll try another distro. My motherboard is the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3L (the HD is SATA so I have no idea why the command is IDE, I just found on google people with the same problem and someone said to do this and didn't explained why)

Is your chipset in legacy mode? Enable AHCI in the BIOS if it is and give it another shot.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2008 22:57

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

TesticledRat posted:

Has anyone checked out this possible notifications/alerts feature in 9.04?

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/253

I think it would be pretty cool to have assuming they make it an optional feature like everything else in ubuntu.

Yeah, it looks like a pretty libnotify client. Didn't really see what was so special about it.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2008 22:54

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Emulated_Reality posted:

Well this is not working, The Samsung site says i need the x86confing file, but cannot find it...

Don't follow any more instructions on the Samsung site. Does the Ubuntu graphics safe mode thing not work?

# ¿ Dec 26, 2008 19:53

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 16:36

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Intrepid is using 2.6.27... I'd give that a shot. My desktop machine dist-upgrade had no problems and I had a bunch of stuff installed.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2008 23:10

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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