Talkback

Talkback

[ In reference to How To Make a StereoGram with GIMP, Blender and StereoGraph in LG#104 ]

David Tansey (djtansey at gmail.com)
Tue Jun 20 21:20:46 PDT 2006

initializing renderer...FAILED;
illegal parametre;

[Kapil] - 1. The texture should not be as wide as the image but much narrower. As per the man page of "stereograph" the texture should be about 100 pixels wide for a 640x480 stereogram. You can experiment with larger sizes for larger images.

2. Since what you want to make is very simple you can experiment with creating the image directly using a simple graphics editor. However, the sensation of depth will depend significantly on how accurately the height (in the 3D image) is mapped to the gray-level of your image.

Hope this helps.

[ In reference to A Brief Introduction to IP Cop in LG#125 ]

Eric Scheitlin (Escheits at sbcglobal.net)
Wed Jun 14 15:23:26 PDT 2006

Is IPCop still actively being developed?

[Thomas] - http://www.ipcop.org/ seems to indicate it is.

[ In reference to A Brief Introduction to IP Cop in LG#125 ]

TONY BOS (tbos at netvision.net.il)
Sun Jun 18 09:15:38 PDT 2006

[Thomas] - Woah! Hold back there. You've given us way too much information. It's going to take me a long time to sieve through it all.

Really -- do you honestly think that if it was me asking that question to you that you would have any idea what I was asking? No -- you probably wouldn't, and I daresay you'd want to have a lot more information than just two very sporadic and disparate setences such as the ones you have used above.

If you're going to ask an actual question you ought to at least read the following which will help you:

http://linuxgazette.net/tag/ask-the-gang.html

I am at a loss as to what "reac" is supposed to mean. Do you mean "react"? If so, that's probably not the right word either -- the two are not even related. You might have meant "compare", but again, the two don't compare since they do different things. So maybe you're just interested in setting up VNC, and maybe making sure that any ports it uses aren't firewalled? If that's your actual question then rephrase it as such with more pertinent information. Configuring VNC really isn't that hard. Google for "vnc howto", you'll get lots of hits there.

Too vague? That's a shame. But then so was your question. :P

[ In reference to From Assembler to COBOL with the Aid of Open Source in LG#126 ]

steve donato (stevendonato at yahoo.com)
Sat Jun 3 20:55:05 PDT 2006

[ In reference to Review: amaroK (audio player for KDE) in LG#127 ]

Alejandro Araiza Alvarado (mebrelith at gmail.com)
Fri Jun 2 18:16:10 PDT 2006

Regarding the issue of being forced to switch to the context browser on track change... this is the classical kde related complain. That is, people complainin about something before even giving it a small effort at figuring it out. Theres an option in the amaok config dialog->General section that reads "Switch to context browser on track change" just uncheck it and that's that.

[ In reference to The Mailbag in LG#127 ]

David Bl (dblas at rocketmail.com)
Wed Jun 7 12:31:36 PDT 2006

Quote:

[Ben] - Well, first off, Unix doesn't have "Folders";
I presume that you're talking about directories.

[Ben] - That's one of the reasons that I'm not a big fan of KDE or GNOME; in some ways, I see them as replicating Micr0s0ft's "Do not fear, little human - Wind0ws(Linux) will not harm you" user interface dynamic. "Let's make Wind0ws users feel at home" is all fine and dandy - but not at the cost of injecting Wind0ws terminology into places in Linux where it doesn't belong, or trying to "soften the impact" of having to deal with a computer by pretending that it's only a fuzzy-wuzzy cuddly loveable version of your file cabinet, yes indeed! Bleh.

Whoops - I appear to have left my 'rant' switch in the "maximum bugf*ck" position. [click] Sorry 'bout that... anyway, right.

[[David]] - Honest, thought out positions against dumbing down the world aren't a bad thing. I first heard "permanent memory=hard disk" on a computer talk show on the radio. From a college professor!!

[[[Ben]]] - [cough] That's not anything to be surprised by, at least in my experience. There are many college professors who know their subject and their business (teaching), and are excellent at both. These, however, are a rarity - I always treasured them whenever I was lucky enough to have one. I guess I've done something right lately, because my current professor is indeed one of this select group: at the age of 72, Ken Hyde is an excellent welder, an amazing teacher, and a damn fine human being overall.

Expecting a college professor to be better acquainted with computers than anyone else, well, I've given up on that one. :)

[[David]] - A Google for "permanent memory" "hard disk" yields among others:

"A hard drive is a memory storage drive disk drive that reads from and
writes to permanent memory."

http://discover.edventures.com/functions/termlib.php?action=&termid=2671&alpha=h&searchString=

(A live CD) "can be run directly from the CD or DVD drive, without
installing into permanent memory, such as a hard drive."

http://www.answers.com/topic/live-cd

You are now cursed. You will now see it used in this way in way too many places.

[[[Ben]]] - [laugh]

[[David]] - I always enjoy linuxgazette BTW.

[[[Ben]]] - Thanks, David! We try our best to produce good content for our readers, and it's always nice to hear back.

[ In reference to How Fonts Interact with the X Server and X Clients in LG#128 ]

Bob van der Poel (bvdp at xplornet.com)
Sun Jul 2 11:31:49 PDT 2006

[Thomas] - Early versions of Redhat (versions up to 6.0, IIRC) used to define the fontserver's address as unix/:-1 -- perfectly valid too, and caused no end of issues.

I never understood why Redhat used to insist on installing two font servers in the vaguest hope they were going to be any good -- they aren't, and commenting out that line entirely is the best course of action, since it's much more trouble than its worth.

[[BobV]] - I will have to try outcommenting that just to see. On the other hand, so long as it works I may leave well enough alone :)

[Thomas] - [Quoting BobV]:

> I can confirm the -1 by doing an 'xset q' as well as by looking that
> the xorg.conf file.

What about:

sudo netstat -apvn | grep -i xfs

netstat -apvn | grep -i xfs
netstat: no support for `AF IPX' on this system.
netstat: no support for `AF AX25' on this system.
netstat: no support for `AF X25' on this system.
netstat: no support for `AF NETROM' on this system.
unix  2      [ ACC ]     STREAM     LISTENING     12007  5435/xfs /tmp/.font-unix/fs-1
unix  3      [ ]         STREAM     CONNECTED     2398890 5435/xfs /tmp/.font-unix/fs-1
unix  2      [ ]         DGRAM                    11994  5435/xfs

Translation?

[[[Thomas]]] - Without going into too much detail (it's boring) what that's saying is that the font server has a connection open (a socket, hence STREAM) and that the socket is used in a connectionless mode (i.e. a Datagram). Essentially, the communication is established with the font server as and when it is needed, and isn't always there hanging to the local XServer. This has to be the case, else the network traffic involved would be very high.

[Thomas] -

> So, is there a significance to the value -1?

It's just another number -- God knows why they chose it, since serving fonts on port 7100 has been normal now for many years.

[[BobV]] - Yes, but should the port number (in this case -1) show up in /etc/services? Oh, wait ... my /etc/services does say:

	# The Dynamic and/or Private Ports are those from 49152 through 65535
  

so, I suppose that the -1 is a dynamic/private port?

[[[Thomas]]] - As far as I know, yes.

[Faber] - IIRC, the -1 says use unix sockets instead of unix ports.

[[Thomas]] - Can you confirm that? I thought this as well, but I can't find any documentation which says that.

[ In reference to A Brief Introduction to VMware Player in LG#128 ]

Richard Neill (rn214 at hermes.cam.ac.uk)
Sat Jul 1 21:35:59 PDT 2006

[Edgar] - Hi Richard,

No, I haven't yet discovered Qemu, although I have seen references to it. Is it perhaps a further development of DOSEMU? Used to use that back in my CompuServe/Tapcis days.

At the moment I am playing with (I refuse to say "fighting") XEN, which also is free software. Since non-proprietary it allows lots of tweaking which means lots of things can go wrong.

If you are comfortable enough with Qemu to recommend it, would you consider an article on it for Linux Gazette? I would be interested in reading about it from someone who went through the process of getting it functional.

There is no one "right" way and often the sheer number of choices makes it difficult to decide, particularly for people new to Linux. An article from someone who has been there can be a huge help.