striker Posted October 29, 2004 Author Share Posted October 29, 2004 Hi Dave,I' m still looking out for some real distros.I send you a PM which clears some things.But I was not watching you and taking myself the plunge again.In order to see what a distro is capable of - or most of the time what it is not capable of - you have to install it on your machine with your set up .There are a couple of distros on my machine now,they installed all very well, at least the ones I do have on them at the moment.Then comes the time to get every distro set up,tweaked and tuned, get under the hood to see what works and what not,doing your updates and that sort of things.So you may have not noticed I had libranet on the rig already.Good to see you've got things worked out now.This way everybody benefits from it.Keep up the good works Dave ! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ozidave Posted October 30, 2004 Share Posted October 30, 2004 I' m still looking out for some real distros.Hi Striker,I'm of the same opinion in a lot of things you have said here and in the PM. (I will respond to that later). That's why I use and recommend either SuSE or Mandrake.The rest are 'toys' to be played with here in the Linux Destruction Forum, and Slack, the biggest toy of them all. I call it the Winter-Distro, something to do when it's too cold to go outside to do something constructive. I'll probably end up screwing it properly trying to get the CD-Drives recognised and 'named' the way 'I' want them. Then I'll take it off forever... because I really don't have any use for it.As I said at the beginning... it's overloaded with duplicate apps and things one would not use... and on top of that, you have to get some of them to work to use them.So! by the time you have finished sorting out the Charlatans from the Genuine User-Friendly Distro's, we will know what contenders there may be for Drake and SUSE.?? But I suspect they will be a Lonnnnnng way behind. Loved your term........ "Built in a Cellar". An apt name for Slack and the rest of them that don't work as promoted. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
striker Posted November 2, 2004 Author Share Posted November 2, 2004 I saw the in another post mentioned review of SimplyMepis.As you might know I' ve got it installed, but had to update it yet : I didn' t do that because of the disaster with libranet. (see my previous posts above.) Review are just guides imo, not the definitive word of wisdom.So I thought "well, I'm cleaning out the distros which are not 100 percent satisfactory,so why don' t give it a shot?If it's gonna break then so what,just remove it like the others you don' t want on the system anymore" .So I took the plunge and started updating SimplyMepis by starting apt-get... first an apt-get update, then an apt-get distro upgrade...to my very big surprise that went ok : all things downloaded and installed well,a reboot of the system brought no inconsistencies at the surface,all things still worked !Then I had the nerve to do an apt-get install synaptic : it downloaded and installed ok too,after adjusting the preferences I used it to install some applications I wanted but that weren' t installed yet : all went ok. Surprise along !All I saw which is not good yet - a minor little misalignment or something alike - are the fonts used within synaptic : you can adjust them within synaptics preferences,but it doesn' t respond.There's also an adjustment option for the fonts in the results window,that works ok. But I have to admit,this is the only little thing that is not ok : don' t understand me wrong,it works but not as it should be : it's a very little tiny micro cosmetical misalignment, that's all.Guess what ? Most of us happen to know the gkrellm package, right? With the plugins and themes and all that...you need to do a sensors-detect in a konsole as root,remember?In SimplyMepis I did that too : at the end it reacts a bit different then the other distros I use it in, but ... it all goes automagically ! (nothing to copy/paste or configure.) Just reboot and start gkrellm : it's all there and functioning, incl. gkrelleds,gkrellweather and gkrellvolume - those I use now,still looking for the gkrellshoot package which I may have missed somehow. Amazing ! And NO error messages at boot up regarding the used modules loaded!There's also a kSensors package availlable now : I use that one as root (gkrellm as user) and had a look in that one also.It looks like a copy of the well known MBM in Windows, and it works ok.Again amazing little thing ...Scanning ...what can I say : the last few days I was killing some time in getting all my installed distros to a point where they would be able to do a simple scan with xsane.There are not so much of them which will do that without a lot of a hassle by configuring this and that,setting permissions and all that sort of things,and I do have some distros on here which simply refuse to do something usable with the scanner as user.PcLos and Mandrake were the only ones without a days job of going through all the above,Lormalinux asked a bit more of "peptalking into it" ,but only Mandrake 10 Official was able to also do a OCR job with Kooka/gocr...until now : SimplyMepis did it right out of the box without any configuring at all,including OCR and even as user! This might be some luck for me,but still : amazing !Sound is working ok,display is working ok,to be honest : I can' t seem to find a thing which is not working at all,or which is not working in a usable matter, except that micro misalignment thing above in synaptic, even that does not render it unusable, o no - you can use it but only the font within synaptic is a little big to my personal taste.Regarding the repositories which SimplyMepis is getting its packages from : they're all debian, yes I know - I still smell that libranet taste in my mouth,aaargh - but these ones,the ones SimplyMepis uses just work ok ! Nothing got broken and believe me,I've got something installed in SimplyMepis at the moment,you don' t want to know ! It just workes ,period. You have the choice of a train wagon of packages to install, that will keep you a couple of hours busy ... As for printing : both my canon and HP work ok.So... after all I have a little distro overhere which might going to be my main distro,even above SuSE when I speak from the 9.1 Personal Edition. (It might even be better in a few regards then the 9.1 Pro Edition imho, but your mileage may vary and it's my personal taste of course.) Time will tell how it goes with SimplyMepis. But this one(v. 2004.03) is not good...it's very good if not excellent! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teacher Posted November 2, 2004 Share Posted November 2, 2004 That sounds wonderful. Any time you have a distro that simply works, it is great. My Winter Distro in Gentoo. Only thing is now it is my fastest distro and I have everything working so it is quickly becoming my favorite. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruno Posted November 2, 2004 Share Posted November 2, 2004 There are a lot of raving reviews on Mepis the last few weeks . . . . I am glad you tested it for us and proved those reviews we read are based on something real Bruno Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
striker Posted November 2, 2004 Author Share Posted November 2, 2004 (edited) Bruno There are a lot of raving reviews on Mepis the last few weeks . . . . I am glad you tested it for us and proved those reviews we read are based on something realThere will be more : here's part 1 .To install additional fonts, drag and drop them into the .fonts directory in your home directory.You can get a few nice ones here :http://www.stibs.cc/mepis/Mepis_Font_Addon_Pack.tar.gz(this package includes the munjoy fonts also and several others)To see them in full glory, try this : open up kWord > tab create text document > Text oriented > A4 (or if you prefer US Letter) > OK.Now click the font drop down box at your left hand : this way you can see how all the fonts will look like. (just like in MS Word)There's a readme file inside the above package which advises to use a slightly other install method, but I prefered the way it was explained in an official Mepis document (MEPIS-TIPS.html) which comes with Mepis by default.It worked ok for me, and I did use the method described above to have a look at them in kWord. The method described in the readme file inside the package I did not use, so I can't say for sure it works or not : you have to find out your self.Inside this readme file there are a couple of links to other addresses to get some additional fonts. You might think "what's wrong with the default fonts" , the answer is a simple "nothing at all" , but when you're doing some fancy dtp stuff now and then you might have a look at those fonts at the addresses above. One day you might need them.I've made a nice new desktop background : it was simply cut and pasted together from some other ones found on www.kde-look.org.So I won' t post my desktop background image here because of copyright things.Regarding the gkrellshoot plugin I mentioned in my previous post : it's not availlable at the repositories unless you download and install it from the usual source, but : in SimplyMepis -if I didn' t look at the wrong place-, the plugins are not installed in the usual way : which way it uses I don' t know yet, but that's the reason I'll skip the gkrellshoot plugin : my goal is not to break the system ,I want to keep it as life as long as possible.I' m planning to do some more testing : next on my testing plans : my digital camera...will it work?Will Mepis be able to read some nice fancy pictures from it? Further more I'm interested in skype or at least I'm looking for a cheap way to do telephone calls from one computer to another one in the same country through DSL. Maybe I can find out how to accomplish that in SimplyMepis. I will report back when I know the answer. (yes, I have the review everybody is talking about printed out in front of me,so the research was already done for me.)----------- update ------------Where are the gkrellm plugins/themes in SimplyMepis?Plugins are here : /usr/lib/gkrellm2/pluginsIn the .gkrellm2 folder in your home directory, you'll find thisfile :plugin_enable .Here's a screenshot of my gkrellm : http://tinypic.com/fqq03What I could find out is that the gkrellshoot package is being worked on at debians,so when it will be ready SimplyMepis might have it too in their repositories by then.----------- update ------------Hurray ! Just before I went to bed I checked for updates for SimplyMepis...the gkrellshoot package is availlable now, just installed it and tested it : works as advertised. I only adjusted the viewer to be used after a screenhot got taken from ee (electric eyes,which I don' t have installed) to eog (eye of Gnome) .All updates went ok. Edited November 2, 2004 by striker Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
striker Posted November 3, 2004 Author Share Posted November 3, 2004 How did the digital camera experiment do ?When you do connect your camera it's important to make sure the camera is turned OFF when connecting it as well as turning the camera OFF BEFORE disconnecting the camera from your computer. If you connect your camera and turn it on you should get something resembling the following in your /var/log/messages : (wait at least 5 seconds or preferably 8 seconds ! ) Nov  3 14:21:34 athlon kernel: usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using address 9Nov  3 14:21:34 athlon usb.agent[6098]:    usb-storage: loaded successfullyNov  3 14:21:34 athlon usb.agent[6098]:    libgphoto2: loaded successfullyNov  3 14:21:34 athlon kernel: scsi8 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devicesNov  3 14:21:34 athlon kernel:  Vendor: OLYMPUS  Model: C750UZ       Rev: 1.00Nov  3 14:21:34 athlon kernel:  Type:  Direct-Access            ANSI SCSI revision: 02Nov  3 14:21:34 athlon kernel: SCSI device sda: 256000 512-byte hdwr sectors (131 MB)Nov  3 14:21:34 athlon kernel: sda: assuming Write EnabledNov  3 14:21:34 athlon kernel:  sda: sda1Nov  3 14:21:34 athlon kernel: Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi8, channel 0, id 0, lun 0Nov  3 14:21:34 athlon kernel: Attached scsi generic sg2 at scsi8, channel 0, id 0, lun 0,  type 0Nov  3 14:21:40 athlon scsi.agent[6172]: update fstab on add deviceNov  3 14:37:05 athlon -- MARK --Nov  3 14:48:00 athlon kernel: usb 2-1: USB disconnect, address 9Nov  3 14:48:01 athlon scsi.agent[6639]: update fstab on remove device The /var/log/messages showed my camera as sda and Olympus C750UZ - the USB mass storage device was registered. It also showed me the camera was on sda1 which is a device,so it would be actually /dev/sda1.The fstab showed me this :/dev/sda1 /mnt/camera vfat,ext2,hfsplus noauto,users,dev 0 0So I assumed the /dev/sda1 was correct and I also saw the mount point for the camera : /mnt/camera .Now there were two ways I could get my pictures off from the camera : the easy way with Digikam(which I will describe in the next post) and through command line (for the hard cores amongst us) ;The command line way xxxxx@2[~]$ su< Password >root@2[xxxxx]# mount /dev/sda1 /mntroot@2[xxxxx]# ls /mntdcimroot@2[xxxxx]# ls /mnt/dcim100olymproot@2[xxxxx]# ls /mnt/dcim/100olympp9130340.jpg  pa210343.jpg  pa210346.jpg  pa210349.jpg  pa210352.jpgp9130341.jpg  pa210344.jpg  pa210347.jpg  pa210350.jpg  pa210353.jpgpa210342.jpg  pa210345.jpg  pa210348.jpg  pa210351.jpg Above you will see the needed commands to make your pictures availlable, below the rest of the commands to copy them ... root@4[xxxxx]# cp /mnt/dcim/100olymp/*.jpg /home/xxxxx/Pictures/Testroot@4[xxxxx]# umount /mnt ... with the first of the two commands above you copy the pictures to your /Pictures/Test directoryin your /home directory.The next command unmounts : don' t forget that before disconnecting your camera !In the next post : the easy way - with Digikam.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
striker Posted November 3, 2004 Author Share Posted November 3, 2004 Here's the easy way(assuming you did an autodetect for your camera within Digikam)1] After booting your pc, connect your digicam via USB to your PC. Now switch on your camera andwait at least 5 seconds,preferably 8-10 seconds .2] open Kmenu > Graphics > Digikam.3] click Album > New Album : enter album name > click ok.4] in the left hand pane (My Albums) select the previously created album5] on the toolbar click icon "Add Images"6] in the Add Images dialog click on "Devices" in the left pane > then in the right pane navigate to Hard Disk(sda1) [/mnt/camera]click on that one > next click on "dcim" > click on "100olymp"7] Here are your pictures ! Now select the ones you want or all of them and click ok.8] Digikam now starts copying the pictures to your previously created albumAfter this proces finished, your pictures will be availlable (see them ?) in the right hand pane of Digikam through thumbnails.Doubleclick on a thumbnail : the integrated Digikam ImageViewer will pop up and show you the picture you selected.(adjust,rotate,crop,flip.print.save as,edit image comments and new exif info is availlable in the toolbar through icons.)That's about it regarding the easy way with Digikam,assuming your camera got recognized in the first place and the fstab entries got updated after switching on the connected camera.Now here's a way to make the camera availlable through a desktop icon :Right click on your desktop > create new > Device > Camera Device.On the tab Device open the drop down box and choose /dev/sda1 > click ok.When your camera is still connected and "on", click on the newly created desktop icon and the dcim folder will be shown in the right hand pane in Konqueror.Now click on the dcim folder > click on the 100olymp folder > here are your pictures again.To make them displayed in Kuickshow all you have to do is click on any of the pictures, but wait afew seconds after that : the picture gets downloaded from the camera and opened up in Kuickshow.Instead of that you can also right click on a picture and choose "Open with ..." and choose theapplication to open your picture with.-----------------DISCLAIMER : all the above reported assuming your camera got recognized and all the periferals gotinitialized, using my Olympus C750UZ as an example. Using any other model camera might give youother readings from the commands shown in the previous post or in Digikam.----------------NOTE : for additional help you might also have a look athttp://home.gagme.com/greg/linux/usbcamera.phpand http://www.buberel.org/linux/usb-automounter.php .So far my digicam experiments.I' m still very happy with my SimplyMepis install.I can also report that the (through synaptic downloaded and installed) gqview package is wonderfull, just what a digicam owner/user wants when working with digicam pictures.When you have SimplyMepis installed and you own a digicam,see for your self what gqview is all about. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
striker Posted November 3, 2004 Author Share Posted November 3, 2004 striker Further more I'm interested in skype or at least I'm looking for a cheap way to do telephone calls from one computer to another one in the same country through DSL. Maybe I can find out how to accomplish that in SimplyMepis. I will report back when I know the answer.I decided NOT to use Skype after I had a thorough look into their privacy policy.I'm still investigating the freeworlddialup scenario. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
striker Posted November 3, 2004 Author Share Posted November 3, 2004 I'm trying the Galeon web browser on SimplyMepis.Man, it's fast ! Fonts look good,pages do render good - as far as I was able to test that in a few minutes,but I've got a few sites in the bookmarks to test that... - and the browser itself looks good to me.Will play a few days with it to see if I make it my main browser. Will report back later then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruno Posted November 3, 2004 Share Posted November 3, 2004 Hi Striker,Yep, it is fast . . . that is why I like it too :)In the preferences under "tabs" I always tick "Open tabs by default" and "open popups in tabs" . . that way it does not open a new window if you middle-click on a link, but it opens a tab . . and because tabs have a "close-button"the popups are easy to kill witout even looking at them ( it used to have a pop-up-blocker but that was removed since the last versions )Also if you make "myportal:" to your start-page you will see all your bookmarks neatly layed-out when you start the browser. Bruno Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
striker Posted November 3, 2004 Author Share Posted November 3, 2004 This is one heck of a neat little rocketing browser ! I like it over Mozilla, sure I do . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teacher Posted November 4, 2004 Share Posted November 4, 2004 Wait until you start right-clicking everywhere and discover all the additional options. That is what keeps me there probably. It has remained my favorite browser in Linux. Scratch that, it is just my favorite browser. I wish I had it for Windows at work. I do settle for Firefox there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
striker Posted November 6, 2004 Author Share Posted November 6, 2004 (edited) I'm still investigating the freeworlddialup scenario.Got it running ok in windows, but in linux (were still talking about SimplyMepis) that's a complete different story.Tried gnomemeeting and kphone to get it going,but didn' t succeed.Now I'm experimenting with linphone, but until now I was not able to tackle this one.--------- update -----------I'm able to get it up and running with kphone and linphone, but for that I do have to temporary switch off the guarddog firewall. (I'm also behind a router ) There's no setting I could find in the firewall I could enable to use either of the above programs for VoIP with freeworlddialup. I'm going to try to get my hands on some more information regarding siproxy,which I've laid my dirty hands on and got installed, but don't know how to configure that one (yet ) : I know there are 2 config files for it,one of them to enable/disable the proxy; the other one is the real configuring file for it which I hope to have a closer look into. obviously from what I could make up of some pointers here and there on the net I need that package to get through the firewall with VoIP.--------- update -----------Got it working finally. All I had to do is enabling the "netmeeting-H323 chat" protocol, didn' t even need the siproxy solution. However, only kphone works now,linphone gives me the ring tone but no voice from the other site : it uses a slightly different protocol I guess. But my initial problem is solved now : with kphone you can definitely use freeworlddialup with SimplyMepis incl. the installed Guarddog firewall package.Remember : I'm behind a router also,if you're not,maybe it's better to disable the H323 protocol in Guarddog as long as you're not awaiting any phone calls. Edited November 6, 2004 by striker Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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