The Mailbag
Submit comments about articles, or articles themselves (after reading our guidelines) to The Editors of Linux Gazette, and technical answers and tips about Linux to The Answer Gang.
installing mandrake 10.0
Wed, 24 Mar 2004 20:58:16 +0000
spb (t14497867 from netscape.net)
Greetings I installedd disks 1 and 2 linux mandrake 10.0 as an upgrade to my linux mandrake 9.2, immediately all froze onsgreen . Need an answer- my 9.2 works ok. thanks.
Wanted point number 1: clearer requests. -- Heather
[Thomas] Hi, unfortunately I often have trouble decyphering all that information that you poured into such a well thought out e-mail. You obviously spent a lot of time thinking about your problem, listing all the symptoms, etc. You should give yourself credit for it.
Here's a tip though:
http://linuxgazette.net/tag/ask-the-gang.html
Oh, if you send HTML e-mail to this list again, there's a high chance you'll get ignored. Seriously we need more information about what id freezing, whether or not you completed your upgrade, whether or not your kernel boots....etc.... Otherwise, how can we help you?
Greetings answer gang, I reply to your mail yesterday.
Alas, he still sent text+html email. Wanted point number 2: I can't use your webmail's HTML folks. Don't waste the bandwidth (about 3x the space!) sending those extra bits. -- Heather
The computer using today has Microsft ME os, I cannot send any info to you from my linux PC, as when I loaded the upgrade mandrake 10.0 on top of my Mandrake 9.2-( purchased from Mandrake central USA} when after some time(I thought it had installed 10.0) it returned to the welcome desktop screen, from there it is completely frozen, the mouse, the arrow keys , tab key and function keys, so restart many times( by power off and on only,my only option at the moment} I arrive each time to this situation, I cannot get to bios settings to change device priority for startup. to use a boot disk or floppy.
[THomas] Presumably you managed to boot off of a CD just fine. In that case, I suggest (no, I urge you) to download knoppix [1] and boot from that. If you have not the facilities to burn CDs, then find someone who can. Why exactly can't you access your BIOS?
That's where you come in, dear readers :D -- Heather
I purchased Mandrake 10.0 from Linuz.org in USA they sent two cd's by airmail without any other info except invoice.
[Thomas] Also, as this is Mandrake, I suggest when you next boot into Linux, you issue:
linux 3
(at the LILO/Grub prompt) so that you're forced into a text-only mode. Hoipefully you should be able to report back to us whether you can login or not, and whether your keyboard is still locked, etc.
Please advise a good Linux Tutorial book for home users, I am not IT boffin thank you .spbramwell.
[Thomas] The book I used wqas "Running Linux", Matt Walsh, et al. Publsihed by O'reilly. You'll find it on amazon no problems.
[Heather] The book I got started with was "Unix as a Second Language" by Sobell, which has now become several books, for different flavors of UNIX. The current one of the Linux flavor shows a penguin belly flopping down a snow bankIt also got renmaed though ... the name escapes me at this hour ... Any of the series though, will definitely make your starting out a little more fun.
Readers: more good book suggestions?
More Cool Answers
Wed, 31 Mar 2004 11:35:38 -0800
Heather Stern (The Answer Gang's Editor Gal)
There's some dark chocolate waiting in the Answer Gang's back lounge for new folk inclined to send in their good tips or a nice long chat about how some useful part of Linux really works. You don't have to join the TAG list either -- just send your bits in to [email protected].
My sig, and Linux Gazette... :)
Mon, 8 Mar 2004 02:18:52 -0800 (PST)
Dave Bechtel (kingneutron from yahoo.com)
Question by carla (carla from bratgrrl.com)
re: http://linuxgazette.net/100/lg_mail.html
Glad you liked my .sig.
I have fond feelings for the original Muppets,
including the Sesame Street ones. Even have some mpeg's of them, such as two
aliens and a hippie singing "Manomonot" on the Muppet Show, as well as the
Intro to the Fraggle Rock show -- in Swedish (I think - it's called
"Fragglarna".)
IIRC, I saw a similar 1337 .sig on Slashdot or somewhere a few years ago, and adapted it for the Muppets. I got a real charge out of seeing it posted in LG.Net (twice now, no less!) and the response it generated. LOL.
(You have my permission to publish this letter or share with LG.Net colleagues if you see fit.)
Best wishes. (And LG, please tell Thomas Adam I'm sorry for being so short with him. I was going through a bad time, and ended up having to move in order to get away from the situation.)
Linux, making Sesame Street more fun... -- Heather
[cc] Looking for Stephen Bint
Thu, 1 Apr 2004 00:20:47 -0500
Ben Okopnik (LG Technical Editor)
Question by Heather (star from starshine.org)
Hello Heather,
Hi, Gianfranco -
I'm not Heather, but I'm the fellow who receives mail at the editor@
address these days.
I lost contact to Stephen Bint who used to be a member in the Answer Gang. Messages to him are bouncing.
Please be so kind and let him know that he should get in touch with me.
Thank you very much.
-- gianfranco accardo gfa2c gmx.net
Stephen Bint was never a member of The Answer Gang; he wrote a couple of articles for LG. I'm afraid we have no way to contact him beyond his email, and given his own statement of his lifestyle:
Stephen is a homeless Englishman who lives in a tent in the woods. He eats out of bins and smokes cigarette butts he finds on the road. Though he once worked for a short time as a C programmer, he prefers to describe himself as a "keen amateur".
- losing track of him is not an unlikely occurence. I'll CC Heather on this, but I doubt that she'll be able to help you any more than I could.
Presuming that he occasionally sneaks into a cybercafe to read LG and write an article now and then, we'll pub the request in the Gazette and see if he responds. To which end, I've left gianfranco's address visible. I apologize in advance if the spambeasts find it too.-- Heather
Back issues of lg as pdbs
Mon, 1 Mar 2004 11:56:12 -0000 (GMT)
Alan Pope (alan from popey.com)
Hi all,
I spoke with Thomas on IRC last night about this but it was late and I'm not sure I made myself clear.
I'd like to be able to read the lg on my palm device. Now I know I can click the TWDT link on the front page of the site, whereupon some magic cgi-bin foo generates a pdb file for me to download. I guess this is taking the text version of TWDT and generating the pdb on the fly?
My question is this. That process is fine and dandy for the current release, but I'd like to read older issues on my palm. Can the pdbs be made available on the ftp site?
[Sluggo] linuxgazette.net doesn't have an FTP site. It now uses a portion of the website for tarball downloads.
The biggest issue with putting Palm-format files in that directory is they will be picked up by the mirrors. We'd have to check with the mirrors whether the bandwidth/size would be a hardship. We also look at how widely used the files would be. The tarballs can be used on any platforms with any OS. Palm files work only with certain brands of palmtops and exclude everything else.
[Thomas] Hence I agree that generating them on-the-fly (talking of that, congratulations, Ben!!) is a far better thing to do.
[Ben] Actually, AFAIK, the Palm Reader is available for several different platforms; certainly for Wind0ws, WinCE and both of the Linux distros made for the iPaq. However, I agree that we shouldn't clutter our tarballs with these things; that was the point of doing this stuff "on the fly" for the folks who want it.
I could convert the files myself I suppose which would probably involve lynxing the TWDT text version of the file and then using "some tool" to generate the pdb from the .txt file. However I just wondered if as that particular wheel has already been invented, it might save some work?
Cheers, Al.
[Ben] Nope, there's nothing set up. I'd suggest grabbing "bibelot" from Freshmeat and converting whichever TWDT you'd like. Here's the simplest way I can think of:
lynx -dump -nolist http://linuxgazette.net/issueXX/TWDT.html|bibelot -f -t twdtXX.pdb
where XX is the number of the issue. If you wanted to do a bunch of them in one shot, you could even do a "for" loop:
for n in `seq $first $last`; do ... done
where $first and $last would delimit the range of issues that you want to convert.
Sure, and I wasn't suggesting that you should add pdb to the tarball or the ftp server, just asking if the process is already there to generate pdbs, why not make it available for back issues too?
Hence me saying why reinvent the wheel.
I don't have a problem downloading the TWDTs and converting them, just thought it would be easier to use whats already there.
Cheers, Al.
HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/
