Clutter Learns Linux

[Cluttermagnet]

Boy, that heatsink cools off real fast, once you end the RAM test. No errors. I still think it is going to be up to the job, but I do want to get CPU temperature monitoring going. I bet it gets real toasty on the IC die itself!I looked at the policy tab and that page is bare, as expected. It's mysterious, those closed ports. This hasn't soured me to firestarter, however. I bet we do figure this out eventually.

Edited May 4, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[Urmas]

I bet we do figure this out eventually.

Yeah... or we'll just say "them gremlins again!"... naah, that wouldn't do... would it?

[Cluttermagnet]

Yeah... or we'll just say "them gremlins again!"... naah, that wouldn't do... would it?

Better gremlins than trolls?

[Urmas]

Better gremlins than trolls?

A toughie, that one... but "troll" does get some "etymology credit" for the derivative "trollkarl":

[Cluttermagnet]

Hmmm-Already better than just bridge trolls... Ruby slippers? Emerald city? What's not to like?Theres no place like 127.0.0.1, there's no place like 127.0.0.1, there's...

[Cluttermagnet]

You guys are so bored today that you're swapping cartoons. :hysterical:I got a little busy with work and haven't done much more with my Ubuntu installs lately. I thought I'd just mention that I actually ordered a case for the Cluttermaster 2007. It's no longer going to be the exciting, advant garde "direct air cooled" version. Now it will just be boring and conventional forced-air fan cooling. I ordered a cheapie tower for it, my first ever black case, to match the nice black DVD/CD burner and DVD player that came with the Dell box. Photo OTOH it is now sporting a frisky new 3.2 GHz processor. The original Cluttermaster 2007 ran a 1.6GHz P4. Moore's Law (and finances) prevent me from upgrading much beyond that, for now.

Edited May 9, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[Urmas]

I thought I'd just mention that I actually ordered a case for the Cluttermaster 2007. It's no longer going to be the exciting, advant garde "direct air cooled" version.

How... bourgeois. How did the song go? Oh, yeah:

Little boxes on the hillside,Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,Little boxes, little boxes,Little boxes, all the same.There's a green black one and a pink black oneAnd a blue black one and a yellow black oneAnd they're all made out of ticky-tackyAnd they all look just the same.

[Cluttermagnet]

Ahhh, yes-That song was written about the new phenomenon 'suburban tract developments' that emerged post WWII in the US in towns such as Leavitown, NY (NJ?). But I can't remember the artist. Woody Guthrie, perhaps?My computer collection is sooo 90's, however- all beige. Thus, the 'beige monolith', my desktop full of computers. I'll post a photo of it if I ever get my desk excavated. My black tower is going to be the 'black sheep' (or swan or whatever) in my collection. Different, but having the heart of a racer.

Can you see me? What do I look like?Yeah- square, black, kind of regularThat's the steel box! Inside I'm tan and handsome...

(Thanks Firesign Theatre)

[zlim]

Levittown, PA., Philly suburb. Spoken by someone familiar with Bucks County, PA.My idea of a nightmare community! I hate any kind of tract housing.

Edited May 9, 2007 by zlim

[Cluttermagnet]

Levittown, PA., Philly suburb. Spoken by someone familiar with Bucks County, PA.

Ahhh, Levittown, PA. That's the one. Well, perhaps I was right about Woody Guthrie, anyway. ;)Those mind- numbing tract neighborhoods did serve a useful purpose, as there was a huge demand for housing, post-WWII. If they failed to meet higher needs of the human spirit, at least they succeeded in a material sense. I've heard true anecdotes, from time to time, about various pets or inebriated husbands coming to the 'wrong' door in those cookie cutter neighborhoods. A friend of mine opened her front door one time and a small dog rushed in, ran up the stairs, and hid under the bed. It was the neighbor's dog. The two houses don't even look alike. Edited May 9, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[Cluttermagnet]

How well do Linux OS's support PCI IDE controller cards? I have a Promise Ultra 100 TX2 IDE controller card. There is a driver package that needs to be installed for Windows. How would Ubuntu Dapper react if this card showed up? Would it have drivers or know how to get them? I might want to set up extra IDE devices in 1 or 2 machines of mine, exceeding the 4 available on a standard mother board's pri/sec IDE busses.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Linux does NOT do well with software RAID controllers, Clutter. Ahh... non-RAID hba. Thanks for pointing that out, Striker. I should pay more attention before posting.http://www.promise.com/product/product_det...p;product_id=11

Edited May 11, 2007 by V.T. Eric Layton

[striker]

How well do Linux OS's support PCI IDE controller cards? I have a Promise Ultra 100 TX2 IDE controller card. There is a driver package that needs to be installed for Windows. How would Ubuntu Dapper react if this card showed up? Would it have drivers or know how to get them? I might want to set up extra IDE devices in 1 or 2 machines of mine, exceeding the 4 available on a standard mother board's pri/sec IDE busses.

He's not talking about raid cards Eric, he talks about IDE Controller cards, used to put 1 to 4 extra hard disk drives in the machine, in this case PATA drives.Clutter : I use the 133 type of these cards from Promise and it's no problem at all in linux, they get recognized in al the distros I have on the machine. No need to load an extra driver for it, the distro does it by default.

[striker]

With /sbin/lspci you'll see this after it's in the machine :

Mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. 20269 (rev 02)

This goes for my 133 type.

[Cluttermagnet]

Thanks, striker!I ran a live session of Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper in my computer that has the Promise card. It recognizes the card. Using Device Manager, I saw an item near the top of the list, titled PDC 20268 (Ultra100 TX2), and under the Advanced tab, there is an item info.linux.driver which reads strlist Promise_IDE. So apparently Ubuntu does have the driver to run this card. This is good news. I figured Dapper might handle it just fine. So now I'm going to transfer the card to my Linux computer and try running a HD and perhaps a Zip drive through it to see what happens.

[striker]

Good news Clutter !

[Cluttermagnet]

I did a successful install of my old HP 932C inkjet printer to my 2nd Ubuntu box (the Cluttermaster 2007), as covered on page 8, post #176 of this thread. Altogether much too easy. I miss the drama of installing HP printers to a Windows box- the dire warnings to not connect the USB cable until the software is installed, the endless drumming of fingertips on the desktop, waiting for the huge torrent of software to install, while listening to the table legs groan from the extra weight of all that software, etc. :hysterical:Hey, guys- I have some more (hopefully not too dumb) questions about Ubuntu. I'm still using Dapper 6.06 here. When Ubuntu installs, normally so does the grub bootloader. I'm fine with that. But I want to deal with a couple of 'what if' situations here. I'm going to be installing Ubuntu in a couple of friends' computers pretty soon now.Question #1: Does the grub bootloader also fully uninstall during a later uninstallation of Ubuntu? Is the previous state of the machine automatically restored? (Assuming that only Windows was installed before)Question #2: Now, what if the machine already has two different versions of Windows present, on two different physical drives, plus the BootitNG boot loader? You'd want to lose Bing before installing Ubuntu, correct? Would grub find all OS's on both drives?Question #3: Although this probably doesn't make sense, humor me here- could the grub bootloader be uninstalled after Ubuntu gets installed, so a different boot loader can be used, such as BootitNG? I wouldn't do that myself, but what if a friend for some reason prefers Bing for a bootloader? (I say learn to like grub)Question #4: Considering almost all of my Ubuntu experience to date is with Dapper 6.06, which of these three might I best install on friends' machines- Dapper 6.06, Edgy 6.10, or Feisty 7.04? I've got all of them. I'm the one who's going to be doing all the setup of the OS's on those machines. Here's my thinking: it would be easiest for me to go with Dapper, then just reformat their root directories later when upgrading (keeping the separate home directory). I'm hesitant to install the later distros since I'm not as familiar with them. Remember, this is on someone else's machine, which I'd only have infrequent access to.

[ross549]

1. Possibly... but I have never uninstalled ubuntu... I have a;lways written over it with a new OS, which also installed a new bootloader. There is the 'fixmbr' tool in windowsXP which should restore the MBR for you too.2. You could uninstall Bootit, but if it resides in the MBR, then the GRUB should overwrite it. GRUN should find the OSs on all the drives.3. You could do that, but in that case I would recommend installing GRUB to the root partition of the distro, sou you could call it up with bootit.4. I would go with the latest version, it is not much different than 6.06. Hope this helps. :)Adam

[Cluttermagnet]

Clutter has been busy with work lately, so progress learning Ubuntu has slowed. I'm pleased that I'm still gradually mastering skills in the new environment. A couple of examples- I had some trouble installing the msttcorefonts on my 2nd Linux machine, but I did figure out on my own that I'd not enabled the Universe and Multiverse repositories. Once I got that done, I was able to get the fonts I needed. A second little victory- I was able to use gLabels to compose and print out some nice business cards. That's what I needed the fonts for.I did have a problem when I tried to install clamav into Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper. Here are some notes from the error messages I saw:

clamav-basesubprocess post- installation script returned errorexit status 1clamav- freshclam dependency problemsleaving unconfigured

That's not an exact quote, but it should be close. There was one other line regarding clamav and 'leaving unconfigured'. I don't know what to do next when an installation goes bad. Open to suggestions...

[Urmas]

I don't know what to do next when an installation goes bad. Open to suggestions...

Uninstall/reinstall... this ClamAV bugaboo is older than Methuselah...

The only way to solve this issue till now has been to try and install the clamav packages more than once which resolves these post-installation errors.

You could try the following:

sudo rm -f /var/lib/dpkg/info/clamav-base.postinstsudo apt-get -f install

( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=4...=clamav+install )AND... YESS!

but I did figure out on my own that I'd not enabled the Universe and Multiverse repositories.

(You wouldn't believe the number of times I... )

[Bruno]

In case you have a good AV on your Windows partition there actually is no need to have one running in Ubuntu as well . . . . . so if clam is giving you headaches, dump it :DB) Bruno

[Cluttermagnet]

Thanks, Bruno-I have put the clamav project on the back burner because I don't have enough time right now to fight with it. I will probably try to get it running at some point, mostly for the learning experience. Yes, I know I don't really need it for Ubuntu. I thought it might be useful for stuff downloaded under Ubuntu which might be exposed to Windows later, by putting downloads in a shared partition. I'd only do occasional on-demand sniffing, I'm not worried about the safety of Ubuntu. Now that I understand the firestarter firewall GUI front end, and have it set up on both Linux machines, I feel pretty comfortable on the net with those boxes. The only improvement I could make now would be a hardware router, but I'm only on dialup, so that may not happen.Oh, BTW, because I'm such a slow study, I'm still running Dapper 6.06 on both machines. And since I'm on dialup, and have not yet gotten around to carrying my towers over to the friend's house to download updates on broadband, my security status is 'out of box', not updated. Still, I feel pretty comfortable running this way (should I?)

Edited May 28, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[Urmas]

Clutter,If you are to install Ubuntu (or Linux in general) for someone else, and that someone is either going to dual boot or just plain wants an AV... "just because" , the easy "Linus' blanket" is Avast!. For Ubuntu, just download the .deb package from here...http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-fo...ux-edition.html... and install it (with GDebi) by double-clicking the package icon.

Edited May 28, 2007 by Urmas

[Cluttermagnet]

Clutter,If you are to install Ubuntu (or Linux in general) for someone else, and that someone is either going to dual boot or just plain wants an AV... "just because" , the easy "Linus' blanket" is Avast!. For Ubuntu, just download the .deb package from here...http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-fo...ux-edition.html... and install it (with GDebi) by double-clicking the package icon.

Thanks, Urmas-Well, that sure does sound like a good way to go. I'll do that instead (for my friends). Yes, both would be a dual boot environment. FWIW, I like Avast very much for Win98SE. It performs well in the free version, and they update it very often- like daily.

[Bruno]

Another one to recommend is F-Prot . . . . since the days of DOS a very good AV, and a long track record when it comes to Linux:Have a look here: F-Prot AV scanner for LinuxYou can set it up as a Cron-job so daily at a fixed time it gets the updates, does a scan and sends out a report of both actions to your mailbox. Bruno

[Cluttermagnet]

Thanks, Bruno-That's a great tutorial. I'm also going to try F-Prot in Ubuntu.

[Cluttermagnet]

Hey, guys-I have another problem zip drive running under Ubuntu. I got a 250M zip drive for this machine. I can't seem to make Bruno's bash script work this time. Maybe it's a simple syntax problem or something like that, or maybe the 250M size presents a problem?Here's what I know so far. Device manager recognizes the drive, and says it is hdd4. The drive has major number 22 and minor number 64. I created a script S95Zipnode in /etc/rcS.d/

#!/bin/bashmknod /dev/hdb4 b 22 64#End script

and I made it active with

sudo chmod 755 /etc/rcS.d/S95Zipnode

When i insert a zip disk (100M), the drive spins up as normal. I don't know for a fact that the drive is working, but it certainly behaves as if it is working. I believe it does work. I received it 'used, as new'. With disk inserted, when I then try to mount the drive, I get an error message saying that hdd4 does not exist.Running

ls -al /dev/hdd4

in Terminal returns

No such file or directory

Running the same check for /dev/hdb4 returns

brw-r--r 1 root root 22 64 2007-05-30 19:38 /dev/hdb4

I have the zip250 hooked up on my secondary IDE in slave position on the cable with the setting C/S. The master device, also set for C/S, I believe, is a DVDRW/CDRW drive.I'm puzzled about the inconsistency between Device Manager and the Terminal query. One says the drive is hdd4, the other implies it is hdb4. Any ideas?BTW I presently have 3 different bash scripts in /etc/rcS.d due to syntax errors. I don't remember how to remove the bad ones which have been made active. How do I do that? So I have ones that refer to hdd4 and others that refer to hdb4 like this:S95Zipnode (hdb4)S95zipnode (hdd4)s95zipnode (hdd4)So far as I know, all 3 are presently active. I'm a little confused...Thanks, Clutter... Edited May 31, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[Bruno]

Hi ClutterI see that in the script you have:

#!/bin/bashmknod /dev/hdb4 b 22 64#End script

. . . and for the rest of the post you talk about hdd4 . . . . . Bruno

[Cluttermagnet]

Hi ClutterI see that in the script you have: hdb4 and for the rest of the post you talk about hdd4 . . . . . Bruno

Yes, yes. All intentional. This is driving me crazy. Device manager says it is hdd4. Terminal says hdd4 does not exist, but hdb4 does exist. :blink:I wrote 3 different bash scripts. 2 use hdd4, one uses hdb4. All are presently active, so far as I know. (How do I get rid of an unwanted script?) Edited May 31, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[striker]

Well, if at the second IDE controller at the slave position it can´t be hdb4. Because you'll have something on the first IDE controller at the master connection (hda), and the CDRW at the master on IDE2, which would be hdc if nothing else at the slave on IDE1.... confusing ?IDE1 master = hdaIDE1 slave = hdbIDE2 master = hdcIDE2 slave = hddNow you'll get the picture.What's connected at your IDE's master and slave connections Clutter ?