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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mystes: May 31, 2006

Kaluza-Klein posted:

It seems the ICH9 southbridge on the P35 chipset my board has does not support AHCI, which is a requirement for the esata port under linux? Or something. So this will never work unless I get a new controller card or motherboard. Maybe.

According to this the ICH9 should have AHCI support so this probably shouldn't be the problem.

Apparently it is possible to do something like:

quote:

echo "- - -" | sudo tee /sys/class/scsi_host/host#/scan

(replacing # appropriately) to rescan the bus ("warmplug") instead of relying on hotplug support to do this automatically.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2009 01:26

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 00:06

mystes: May 31, 2006

Kaluza-Klein posted:

That just gets me a permission denied error?

That's strange. You're right about the ICH9 (I also have one and the fact that it's using the ata_piix module rather than the ahci module apparently means that it's not using ahci) but that command works for me (well, I don't have anything plugged in so I don't really know but I don't get an error).

# ¿ Apr 20, 2009 01:27

mystes: May 31, 2006

You should be able to install "natilus-share" (I'm not familiar with Fedora but it looks like it is included) and then you can share a folder by right clicking on it and setting the sharing options.

mystes fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Apr 28, 2009

# ¿ Apr 28, 2009 04:25

mystes: May 31, 2006

rugbert posted:

Its Ubuntu 8.04. X wont load, startx gives me an error saying "x cannot stat etc x11 x no such file or directory aborting. xinit: Server Error"

I used aptitude to check which x packages were install and it looks like x11-xserver-utils is install with xserver installed as a virtual(?, its listed as v) package.

edit - reinstalled xserver and ran startx and got a fatal error about the font path. double checked and xorg wasnt installed. Installed that and ran start x and got a blank screen...

Did you use the alternate installation cd or did you uninstall stuff? Anyway, try install the package xorg. I think it may include all the stuff you need.

# ¿ May 16, 2009 22:23

mystes: May 31, 2006

rugbert posted:

I did, I noticed that xorg wasnt installed and installed it but I got a blank screen. I just tried a LiveUSB to double check to see if its my PC or linux and after the Ubuntu loading screen finishes, blank screen.

So I tried a different video card and same thing. Whats weird is that Ive had Ubuntu running using both of the video cards I have before. AND if hit alt-ctrl-f2 I can open the terminal and see that on the screen.

Im removing xorg, xserver, and gnome desktop and will try reinstalling them. Should I install them in a specific order?

Oh, sorry I wasn't reading very carefully. The error messages you posted before were indicative of important stuff not being installed, but getting a just blank screen (especially after you boot from the live usb image) suggests that for some reason the default x configuration has issues on your computer.

Can you log in on the console and look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log ?

# ¿ May 16, 2009 22:52

mystes: May 31, 2006

rugbert posted:

Im not seeing any errors, no (EE). I can post it somewhere if you think you could take a look tho.

You might be better off going to the ubuntu forums. Although I've dealt with this sort of thing in the past I think it's been at least four years since I've actually had X not work out the box. Nowadays that makes it such a major bug that someone should probably already know about it. Unfortunately if you don't have any error message there isn't really anything you can google but asking around somewhere with more ubuntu users is probably the simplest option.

Edit: Since you can't find any errors you might actually want to log in on the console and first do something like "ps -A | grep -i xorg" to see if xorg is still running. If it's not running check dmesg if you haven't already and if you still can't find any error messages I'm out of ideas. If xorg is still running my guess would be that it's running at a resolution your monitor can't handle for some reason and you could try manually configuring the settings if you really want to pretend it's the first half of the current decade or earlier.

mystes fucked around with this message at 05:18 on May 17, 2009

# ¿ May 17, 2009 05:08

mystes: May 31, 2006

rugbert posted:

oh gently caress me. yea Im an absolute moron. I dont have a monitor so I plugged it into a huge TV. I just borrowed a monitor from someone and it worked no problem.

Well ideally it should work on the tv without manual configuration. What you can do if you have to use the tv and before you can fix the problem is the following:
1) Run x using startx or just log in to xdm / gdm if you can do that without being able to see the screen.
2) Log in on the console (another console if you used startx).
3) do "export DISPLAY=:0"
4) now you can use xrandr to change the resolution like "xrandr --size 640x480".
5) At least one of the screen resolution configuration programs (that run under x; this is a lot more convenient than editing the configuration file by hand) in ubuntu should let you change the resolution permanently I think.

However, now that you have another monitor temporarily you might as well lower the resolution to 640x480 so that you can conveniently adjust it with your tv.

Actually, I wonder if there's some proper way to handle this in Ubuntu by forcing it to use some sort of fallback settings in a user-friendly fashion?

Edit: You should probably file some sort of bug. Probably your TV has defective information on what resolutions it can handle but there might at least be some sort of blacklist that it can be added to in order to override the default settings.

mystes fucked around with this message at 19:49 on May 17, 2009

# ¿ May 17, 2009 19:44

mystes: May 31, 2006

Terminus, the fact that it works fine when you go into the grub menu and select the default option is pretty crazy and I can't explain that.

When you select the recovery mode, do you just cancel out and then it works? If so, does it display the graphical loading splash screen when you do this (this is really lazy of me but I don't want to reboot to find out). The splash screen causing problems is pretty much the only explanation I can think of.

Since x works some of the time, I don't think it can be a problem with its configuration.

# ¿ May 19, 2009 00:17

mystes: May 31, 2006

What did you put as the proxy in your browser? Are you putting the server address? You should be using 127.0.0.1 with port 8080. You also don't need to forward port 8080; the 8080 is the port your using on your ssh *client* that is forwarded through the ssh connection.

Edit: Your link is bad but I found the tutorial. If you followed it everything should work. Maybe you should post all the relevant settings because it seems most likely that something is set wrong.

mystes fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Jun 4, 2009

# ¿ Jun 4, 2009 04:44

mystes: May 31, 2006

Rather than copying the whole filesystem I would recommend figuring out how to use tmpfs with some sort of overlay filesystem so you can just copy the changed files back. However, I really have no idea why you want to do this. If you're just trying to reduce the number of writes there must be better ways such as just doing what the live usb images do (use a read-write partition as an overlay but have the main partition read only).

Edit: BTW, you should know that what you're trying to do is inherently a bad idea since you have no way of knowing that the state will be consistent if you just copy things back.

It would be best if you could explain what you want the result to be like so that people can suggest other possible implementations.

mystes fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Jun 12, 2009

# ¿ Jun 12, 2009 05:48

mystes: May 31, 2006

fatman1683 posted:

Basically I want to replace my current 3-box home network setup with one box. I want to use an Atom board and a small SSD to minimize power consumption and heat and allow more rapid booting on par with a commercial router, and I want to use the RAMdisk setup to maximize the lifetime of the SSD and improve performance, since the SSDs I'm looking at have dreadfully slow write speeds.

If anyone can suggest a better way to accomplish this I'm certainly open to ideas, this is just what I came up with from farting around with stuff I could find on Google.

If you're just running some minimal server software, I wouldn't even worry about doing more than the basic stuff like using noatime. Copying a whole filesystem several times a day will probably just create more writes. I would recommend just buying the cheapest SSD possible, which should still last several years. There's so much filesystem work going on right now that if you wait 2 years there is sure to be a better way to increase the life of SSD's.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2009 18:54

mystes: May 31, 2006

NZAmoeba posted:

As for compression, you could always zip the image afterwards? A shitload of 0's should compress pretty easily methinks.

Just pipe the output of dd to lzop if you want to store the image compressed.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2009 03:34

mystes: May 31, 2006

Severed posted:

I think I messed up something with my other hard drive that had Windows XP installed on it.

Before I installed Linux I had a C:/ windows drive and an E:/ windows drive.

The C drive had Windows Vista installed and the E drive had Windows XP installed.

I decided to install Linux on the "C" drive, thus making the E: drive my only Windows hard drive.

Well, GRUB has "other" listed on the boot loader, but when I select it nothing happens. I put in my Windows XP installation CD and ran the recovery console; only to find that my E drive somehow got switched to a "C" drive... which is probably why its not loading. I imagine I will have to fix an assload of things to get it to boot at this point. Can I somehow change the drive letter back to E:?

What do you mean when you say your windows xp installation drive was E? I don't know how windows assigns drive letters but if you boot from that drive wouldn't it be C? At any rate, this is probably irrelevant since drive letters are just something windows assigns however it feels like it. Either the grub boot entry is pointing to the wrong drive / partition or you somehow don't have a valid MBR on the windows drive. You can screw around with grub's settings when you're in it if that's the problem and then edit the configuration file to change it permanently. If it's the MBR on your windows drive there's some way to do it from the windows install CD I think.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2009 02:00

mystes: May 31, 2006

Severed posted:

Ah, that makes sense. Although I think my E drive got switched to a C drive somehow because when I ran chkdsk it defaulted to C:/windows and the date on which the drive was created was correct.

I think it is C just because C refers to the drive the windows installation in question is on. I don't think there is such a thing as switching a drive to a C drive. However, I use linux so what do I know.

Severed posted:

The E:/ drive had always been XP; which is for some reason not loading at all. Even if I bypass the GRUB loader and boot directly from the hard drive.

If you can't boot from the windows drive when it is the master then you seem to have an MBR issue that you should be able to fix with a windows cd somehow.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2009 02:03

mystes: May 31, 2006

Most likely there will be no way to do data recovery since PTP is probably too high level to allow you to access anything lower level than images. Gvfs-mount won't help that problem because it just uses fuse to create a virtual filesystem over the protocol the camera is being accessed through.

Edit: You probably would have already tried this if it was possible but is there a way to put the camera into an MSC mode (without reformatting the memory)?

mystes fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Apr 6, 2010

# ¿ Apr 6, 2010 01:42

mystes: May 31, 2006

IanMalcolm posted:

NVidia cards have a tecnology called PureVideo on windows. Basically it uses CUDA over DirectX to decode some formats (h.264 being the most notable, also the most usable). Since PureVideo depends on DirectX, it will never come to Linux.

There has been linux support for purevideo for a long time. If you have a video card with purevideo support there are drivers for various video players. There is work on various other types of video acceleration for other cards but none if it is complete so purevideo is your best bet.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2010 14:26

mystes: May 31, 2006

bewilderment posted:

I'm not sure if this is the right thread for this, but it seems like it's either here or the Ubuntu thread.

Is there any disadvantage to installing Ubuntu through Wubi over installing it through a CD/USB?

I'm installing it in the first place because I've finally come to realise that developing in a variety of programming languages seems a lot simpler using the tools GNU and Linux provide inbuilt rather than Windows, which I only really have because of familiarity + games. I'm also already somewhat comfortable with using a *nix terminal because of university requiring it, whereas I'm not as cool with the Windows cmd or PowerShell, although I have done (very little) PowerShell scripting.

I chose Ubuntu over Linux Mint, openSUSE or Fedora just because it's what seems to have the most accessible support and I'm not really scared off by Unity when I've never tried a different full-featured Linux before in the first place.

Wubi is completely the same as normal Ubuntu aside from installing to a file on your existing NTFS partition and using the existing Windows bootloader to launch grub. By all means install that way. It's extremely convenient if you may want to be able to easily get rid of the Ubuntu installation in the future since you don't have to mess around with partitions.

The only possible downside I can think of is a recurrence of something like a previous bug when upgrading between versions of Ubuntu that made Wubi installations temporarily unusable, but hopefully that won't happen again.

If you ever want to move to a normal partition for whatever reason that should be pretty easy too (well, possibly less easy if you aren't that familiar with linux).

Unity isn't not full-featured or anything, it's just a different interface for launching programs. It's not that major a difference, and you don't have to use it if you don't want anyway.

mystes fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Sep 28, 2012

# ¿ Sep 28, 2012 02:46

mystes: May 31, 2006

Suspicious Dish posted:

They have an Android app, and a ChromeOS app. Roku's whole gimmick was Netflix on Linux (decryption was done as a hardware module). They could support Desktop Linux as a platform, but they don't want to.

It's not just "Silverlight".

Well, obviously they could support linux, but the reason the desktop version of their site doesn't just magically work on linux is because they're using silverlight.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2012 22:07

mystes: May 31, 2006

Are the iphone and android versions that secure that nobody could obtain the videos from them, though? It seems more likely that nobody cares since the quality isn't that high. Couldn't they just make a linux version that just plays the iphone videos?

# ¿ Oct 20, 2012 15:07

mystes: May 31, 2006

evol262 posted:

sudo su -

Is there some reason to do this instead of sudo -i or something?

# ¿ Oct 23, 2012 00:37

mystes: May 31, 2006

Suspicious Dish posted:

I doubt that can happen. There's no session remoting built in to X, so you can't put one thing over the network with VNC, and another on the local display.

Couldn't you just start another X session to display a screen saying that the computer was locked, and then do something to prevent the user from using the appropriate keyboard shortcut to switch back to the original session?

# ¿ Dec 11, 2012 03:05

mystes: May 31, 2006

Suspicious Dish posted:

Yes and no. This is how fast user switching currently works, but the issue is making VNC work properly remotely due to a myriad of technicalities.

Does some stuff stop working on a session when you switch out of it? Or is something even weirder happening? I've never really tested it and have no idea how it's actually implemented.

Edit: Oh that at least sounds like it could probably be fixed or at least worked around with some sort of hack if anyone really cared.
vvv

mystes fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Dec 11, 2012

# ¿ Dec 11, 2012 03:22

mystes: May 31, 2006

ilkhan posted:

If I want to share files to my network is there something simpler than samba? For some reason 1 of my computers can access my file server and the other one says do not have permissions. Both have the same username on the windows side. Its frustrating.

http?

# ¿ Jan 8, 2013 00:46

mystes: May 31, 2006

ACID POLICE posted:

I need to put Linux on something with just a floppy drive. Was going to do Slackware 8.1 since that seems to be the last with floppy installs but should I consider something else? 166mhz Pentium MMX and 96MB RAM.

e: I see rootdisks up to 11 but they go from 5 disks to 2 after 8.1 which makes me think there's a little more to work with on the set of 5 floppies.

Is this just for fun? Because there are probably better ways to get linux onto the computer if you need to. For example, by installing it directly to the hard drive using another computer, or throwing out the harddrive and replacing it with a compactflash card.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2013 05:33

mystes: May 31, 2006

Thermopyle posted:

This is probably a long shot, but...

Say I want to upload an image on website #1 to website #2. On Windows in the various browsers you can right click > copy location the image, and then when the upload form on website #2 opens the system file selection dialog box, you can paste the url of the image into the file name text box and Windows will do whatever magic to download the file from website #1 and upload it to website #2.

On Ubuntu 12.10, there is no file name input text box on the Unity file selection dialog to even try this on.

Any way to do this?

You can get the file name input box back with ctrl-l and you can open urls this way in most programs but it doesn't look like it works in chrome or firefox in a file upload form. This is a browser issue I guess, although I don't know exactly what magic happens when you enter a url, but it probably requires that the application be able to handle urls via GIO which chrome and firefox don't, not being developed by people who are especially enthusiastic about gnome.

mystes fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Jan 26, 2013

# ¿ Jan 25, 2013 23:57

mystes: May 31, 2006

Scruffy the janitor posted:

This may be as good of a place as any to ask, where would be a good place to sell a laptop running Ubuntu? I think people on Craigslist get scared when they see it isn't a Windows or Mac and I didn't get any hits listing it on SA Mart. Am I stuck with ebay?

Did it come with Ubuntu? If not, why don't you just reinstall Windows?

# ¿ May 2, 2013 16:11

mystes: May 31, 2006

Scruffy the janitor posted:

It didn't, but I have no idea how to reinstall Windows since it doesn't have a CD drive and I'm not exactly computer savvy. My dad is the one who put it on there.

I guess it's outside scope of this thread but if you have an appropriate Windows CD you could just get a $30 USB cd-rom drive, plug it in, and reinstall it (you would likely recoup the $30 when you resell it), which shouldn't be hard even if you don't know much about computers. The laptop probably has the serial number on it somewhere and you won't have a problem activating it since it's the same laptop you had it activated on before. The laptop may also have come with a recovery partition with a copy of the original windows install but it's likely your father wiped this out when installing Ubuntu.

Note that if Windows is actually still installed along with Ubuntu you could just get rid of Ubuntu and resize the Windows partition.

# ¿ May 2, 2013 16:55

mystes: May 31, 2006

Experto Crede posted:

Does anyone know how I'd use curl to download a content and its directory over ftps?

I can use wget -m, but it only support ftp, and I'd rather have the extra layer of security involved.

Any ideas?

Is this something you're trying to do from a script or interactively? If the latter you can probably use lftp.

Bob Morales posted:

Scp?

Ftps (ssl wrapped ftp), not sftp.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2013 13:42

mystes: May 31, 2006

Suspicious Dish posted:

VMWare and VirtualBox both have graphics hardware passthrough. It's just QEMU/KVM that's taking some time, because there's security issues there.

But seriously once you have a dedicated video card for windows and consider all the trouble and decreased io performance it would probably make more sense to get another computer under most circumstances.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2013 04:49

mystes: May 31, 2006

Is there any good way to record the audio from a specific instance of the flash plugin while having everything else play normally? I'm using selenium to automatically play something in firefox (admittedly hackish but it's working decently; maybe I'll try to figure out if I can use rtmpdump or something later) but my current lovely solution using pulseaudio is to take the output from pacmd to get a list of pids playing audio, find which one is descended from the selenium firefox process, switch that to a null sink, and record that sink. This isn't ideal because there's a delay before my script switches it over, and also pulseaudio wants to send the output from subsequent instances of the flash plugin to the same null sink. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any better solution that won't affect my other audio as well. Flash uses alsa, so there's nothing that specifically identifies the instance I want to record from the point of view of pulseaudio, and I can't use the alsa configuration file to record everything because that would also affect other flash plugin instances.

It seems like there should be a LD_PRELOAD library that would do this, but with alsa and pulseaudio there isn't. Short of changing $HOME so I can use a different alsa configuration file, or running selenium as a different user, is there any better solution?

mystes fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Mar 29, 2015

# ¿ Mar 29, 2015 02:09

mystes: May 31, 2006

evol262 posted:

Why is selenium not a different user? Why aren't you running these tests in clean VMs where this stuff (all other flash processes) doesn't matter?

Laziness and because I just wanted to run it out of my own cron script. I guess I should just run selenium as a different user. I'm not actually "testing" anything, I'm just using selenium because I need to run a browser, ideally headlessly, and inject javascript into the page to make magic happen.

This is just a really lazy way of getting live, streaming audio out of a lovely webpage.

If I run selenium as another user what's the best way to do this? I guess I can just create a pulseaudio configuration that only has a null sink and not the actual sound card?

mystes fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Mar 29, 2015

# ¿ Mar 29, 2015 02:28

mystes: May 31, 2006

mystes posted:

If I run selenium as another user what's the best way to do this? I guess I can just create a pulseaudio configuration that only has a null sink and not the actual sound card?

Apparently this isn't that easy. I've tried using pulseaudio with just a null sink and I've tried using snd-aloop directly and through pulseaudio, and I just can't get anything to play; I think somehow my normal user's pulseaudio session is tying something up that's preventing the second pulseaudio daemon or snd-aloop device from working. Has anyone done anything like this or used different audio cards for different users?

# ¿ Mar 29, 2015 22:14

mystes: May 31, 2006

reading posted:

If the ownership of a file (in a debian system) is "myusername root" when shown with $ ls -l , is that...uh, bad? I had to change ownership of some files to get them to run even though they're in /etc/openvpn and I think everything in /etc/ should probably be "root root" but I am a privileges newb.

It's just the group. You might want to change that to but it probably doesn't matter in this case.

# ¿ May 11, 2015 20:48

mystes: May 31, 2006

program666 posted:

I was wondering if there is some kind of media player for linux that would make integration with my android phone easily. More specifically I wanted to tag some music on my PC as "gym" and have a easy way to transfer only "gym" music to my phone, or maybe having an arbitrary part of my library on my phone and be able to filter them by the "gym" tag.
I'm guessing the only easy way to it right now is using google play music. I couldn't find a way to tag songs, but I can see you can add them to a playlist so maybe I could just use the playlist on my phone even if not all of the music is there. I also don't know how dependent on having constant internet connection this app is, but since google tend to not give a gently caress about offline usage, and I don't have internet on my gym, so maybe there is something better for my use case?
I really don't need the cloud, I would much prefer to just transfer the music I want from my pc, I just wanted to have whatever I use to organize it somehow reflected on my phone. I could probably just create a playlist for mpd (PC) on a format that will also be readable by poweramp (Android), and those are the two app I'm currently using, but I wanted to know if you guys know of something better.

I would do something with Bittorrent sync, like a script that reads the playlist or just a script that hard links the currently playing song to a directory or something.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 21:43

mystes: May 31, 2006

hooah posted:

Is it possible to use a newer version of Java on a machine I don't have permissions to install things on? I have a jar that uses Java 8 stuff, but I only have 1.7.0_51-b13 available.

I'm pretty sure the normal installation procedure is just to dump it in a directory. The part where you have to fight with it is setting links and variables so you actually use the right version, but this may actually be easier if you're just using it for one program, instead of on a typical machine where you're never sure what's using the oracle JDK and what's using openjdk and stuff randomly breaks.

mystes fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Dec 5, 2015

# ¿ Dec 5, 2015 18:08

mystes: May 31, 2006

hooah posted:

Because I'm using Python as well, so I'd want to install the modules I'm using in a virtualenv. Java's getting called from the Python script, which is why I needed Java as well.

So install virtualenv in your home directory first.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2015 22:16

mystes: May 31, 2006

peepsalot posted:

On my laptop I have one of those nub pointing devices built into the keyboard. If i middle click and move the nub around I can scroll vertically and/or horizontally quite quickly. However if I plug in a USB mouse and attempt to middle click and drag, it doesn't do anything. Is this an X configuration issue? I'm running Linux Mint w/ Cinnamon desktop.

I think you need to enable wheel emulation with xinput or by editing your xorg.conf. It's probably on for pointing sticks and off for normal mice by default or something.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2015 14:40

mystes: May 31, 2006

Cingulate posted:

What's the proper way to copy files between two users on one machine? I'm not root, but I have passwords to both users. I can think of a few ways, but all of them feel stupid.

Set appropriate permissions (on the file or destination folder depending on which account you're doing the copying from), copy the file with cp or whatever. With traditional Unix permissions, you'll probably want to use groups.

mystes fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Dec 24, 2015

# ¿ Dec 24, 2015 02:32

mystes: May 31, 2006

DeaconBlues posted:

I have a passing interest in running Firefox sandboxed in Fedora.

My question is whether this a good idea?

if $question ; then
echo 'Are there any recommendations for doing so?'
fi

I'm on Ubuntu, but I'm currently using firejail with the "private" option to restrict firefox to a specific directory (this allows it to see the root filesystem but replaces your home directory with an overlay), and I have a separate directory and profile for normal browsing and for email. I don't know how much I actually trust firejail to provide real security, but at least way if there's another bug like the pdf reader one, a malicious website won't be able to look around my actual home directory or steal my gmail cookie without some sort of firejail specific exploit or privilege escalation.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 18:17

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 00:06

mystes: May 31, 2006

syntaxfunction posted:

I have a question though. I have Xournal and a Wacom tablet which is great for PDF annotations, but what's a good standard writing program? Something like Word but a bit more light weight would be good. Most of the ones I've found lean towards too barebones (Basically just Notepad) or on the programmer side of things. Thanks.

There's Abiword, I guess, if that still exists.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2016 22:04

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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