The Mailbag
Send tech-support questions, Tips, answers and article ideas to The Answer Gang <linux-questions-only@ssc.com>. Other mail (including questions or comments about the Gazette itself) should go to <gazette@ssc.com>. All material sent to either of these addresses will be considered for publication in the next issue. Please send answers to the original querent too, so that s/he can get the answer without waiting for the next issue.
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KylixHola amigos :
Alguien sabe como Podria ejecutar un programa compilado en Kylix, fuera del entorno de Kylix?
Hi, friends. Does anybody know how to run a program that's compiled in Kylix, but without having the Kylix environment around at runtime?
!ah! Un comentario demonio (daemon )siguifica Dinamic access memory, estoy equivocado?
Ah! A daemon commentary means dynamic access memory, or am I mistaken?
Gracias por su tiempo. Octavio.
Thanks for your time. -- Octavio
Octavio-- Sorry, I've never used Kylix. I just ran a demo once. I don't understand your second question. Memory is hardware; a daemon is software. And what's a "daemon commentary"?
Octavio-- Lo siento, no he usado Kylix. Ejecute' un demo de e'l una vez, no ma's. No entiendo la segunda pregunta. La memoria es hardware, un demonio es software. Que' significa un "comentario demonio"?
-- Mike Orr
Hola amigos :
Espero que puedan ayudarme, resulta que en mi maquina instalé firebird, y luego cree una base de daatos, luego desde Kylix me conecte sin problemas.
De la misma forma quise hacer en otras máquinas que tienen redhat 7.2, copie el instalador firebirdCC....rpm, pero resulta que me sale un error :
Hi friends, I hope you can help me. I installed Firebird on my computer, and then created a database, which I can connect to from Kylix without problem.
I wanted to install it the same way on other Red Hat 7.2 machines. I copied the installer FirebirdCC RPM, but got the following error:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- warning : Expected size : 2676232=lead(96)+sigs(68)+pad(4)data(2676064) warning : actual size : 2676232 warning : Expected size : 2676232=lead(96)+sigs(68)+pad(4)data(2676064) warning : actual size : 2259998 error : unpacking of archive failed on file /opt/interbase/lib/libgds.so.0 ;3 d021bc6 ; cpio:need --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Intente bajar de internet el mismo paquete pero el resultado para instalarlo es el mismo error.
(Heather: oboy, my spanish is rustier than Mike's, but I'll try.)
I intend to go under the internet to packets (maybe: download the package?) but the result of installing is an error.
Como puedo solucionar este problema ?
Gracias por su tiempo Octavio
What's the solution to this problem? Thanks for your time. Octavio.
netbooting Linux from network by using pppoeHello,
Hi!
I want to install a Linux on my PC. This PC has a Ethernet connection towards a DSL modem. Across this Ethernet I had to use PPPOE. Is their an image available with PPPOE support? The standard netboot.img has no support for PPPOE. This image recognize my Ethernet but thus not allow me to activate PPPOE across it.
I want to install Redhat 7.3 across the net. Thanks in advance for your answer.
Grt
Wim
I'm pretty certain that most, if not all rather new images include that, exactly why you ask - to get dsl up and running.
Robos
So if someone knows the hint Wlm needs, let us know, and we'll publish your Two Cent Tip. -- Heather
Tools for altering installed kernelI am helping someone out on another list I am on and a have a query.
Does anyone know of a reliable utility to alter parameters on an installed kernel other than rdev.
In particular whether there is anything that will get rid of debugging in the kernel?
I would just recompile personally but if anyone knows of a tool that would be useful.
usb pegasus driver vend/prod idHi,
I have a USB ethernet adapter based on the Pegasus/Pegasus-II chipset. I tried to use the pegasus driver with a 2.4.3 kernel but the driver is not claiming the vend/prod id of the USB adapter. Unfortunately I am unable to recompile a more recent kernel for my system. I would like to know if there is a way to spoof the vend/prod id somehow (without flashing the USB adapter) so the pegasus driver claims the device. I am thinking there is perhaps some kernel mechanism to increase the set of devices claimed by a particular driver at runtime. I think a more recent kernel version would solve my problems but a recompile is not an option for me because of my particular setup. Any ideas?
Ebo
Don't use quoted printable with no fancy characters to defend.
Maybe one of our readers can suggest the right tricks for compiling modules that are only major-version dependent instead of minor version dependent. I think some people who use linmodems might know a Tip or two.
Note you still have to have the right symbols present in your kernel. If they aren't, you won't be able to use the module safely, even with insmod -f. -- Heather
Mistake in December 99 Linux GazetteHi,
I'm a French student and I tried to compile a little program I found in your magazine in your "Linuxthreads programming" section of December 99 magazine. The programm is not working and I didn't find why. Could you help me please to make it work.
Thanks
Your best bet is to contact the author, Matteo Dell'Omodarme. His address is at the top of the article. But you'll need to say something more specific than "not working". See http://www.linuxgazette.com/tag/ask-the-gang.html and scroll down to "doesn't work". How exactly did it fail? -- Mike
Re: Making executables smallerJohn sent us a 2 Cent Tip, so the Answer Guy wondered...
Are you the same John Fisk that originally started the Linux Gazette? -- JimD
Hello Jim,
Thanks so much for the note. And yes, it's me. Since the last submission (now a couple years ago) I've been rather busy finishing up medical training (Pathology and Medical Informatics at Yale) and my wife and I have adopted a little girl from China (with another one on the way). Thomas Adam (the new maintainer of the Weekend Mechanic column) and I just started corresponding and I took the opportunity to look over the latest edition of the LG. The folks at SSC have done a commendable job of keeping the LG alive and very active. I really appreciate the great job they've done.
cheers,
John
Is it possible to have a latest issue link?Can we have something like a www.linuxgazette.com/latest link?
http://www.linuxgazette.com/current -- Mike
linux gazette 79 article improvementHi Krishnakumar R.
Your series of articles "Writing Your Own Toy OS" on Linux Gazette is the best ever.
I am enjoying it very much and I'm eager to learn something about the 80x86 protected mode.
I also have a suggestion. In part II, I think the code for write.c can be improved a little.
When reading sect2 with
file_desc = open("./sect2", O_RDONLY);
read(file_desc, boot_buf, 510);
close(file_desc);
instead of reading only 510, you can actually read 512 bytes with no harm.
It doesn't hurt to be 510, but I think it would be more easy to understand it's 512, so that learners won't be thinking that the second sector also have to finish with the magic numbers x55 xAA, just like the first sector does.
I'd like to know what do you think about it and if you agree.
See you and thanks a lot, man!
Silvio Luis Leite Santana
[The article was changed at the author's request. -Iron.]
Kudos
Guess what - I got a job
. A guy I worked with a few years back was
reading the Linux Gazette, and saw my article.
In May's issue, http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue78/tougher.html -- Heather
He emailed me, and one lunch and two meetings later I was employed again. You definitely get the assist on that one.
I also credit your magazine for keeping me sane the last 8 months - writing for you has been a great outlet. I'll keep the articles coming.
Difference between LJ and LGAt our company there has been some discussion as to the differences of the Journal and the Gazette. Would you please respond with SSC's definitive description of the difference and is both being published at this time. Thereby we can put to rest any further discussion at our work place.
Regards,
Wyman Griffin
Linux Journal is a commercial print magazine. Linux Gazette is a free e-zine that SSC donates some employee time to. LG was started by an individual, John Fisk, then SSC took over responsibility for it when John no longer could.
LJ pays authors for their work. It has a stricter standard for what it will accept, does professional proofreading and technical editing, won't publish anything that's been published elsewhere (with occasional exceptions), and doesn't allow republishing without permission. Each LJ issue has a theme, and articles are solicited for that theme (although any issue will have lots of non-theme articles too). Space issues determine the number of articles and their length. (Because the printer prints on 32-page sheets, you have to add pages in groups of eight.) LJ also publishes several series of publicly-accessible web articles at http://www.linuxjournal.com, for which we pay the authors just like magazine articles. (The magazine articles are also available to the public after three months.) For specific questions about LJ, contact the Linux Journal Editor, ljeditor@ssc.com.
LG does not pay authors, does less time-consuming proofreading, and publishes pretty much anything we have permission to publish that's about Linux, contains some significant content of a more or less permanent nature ("new information" or reference material), doesn't unfairly slam/slander anybody, and isn't a mindless advocacy rant. But we don't go looking for content, we let it come to us. LG issues do not have a theme, we just publish articles whenever they arrive. There is no particular number of pages to fill, so we don't pay attention to article count or article length, although we do try to keep the issue size to less than 2 MB compressed (occasionally 4 MB). LG does not accept advertisements, although we do have a sponsorship program that gets your logo on the home page. LG is published under the Open Publication License, so readers may copy and redistribute it (for free or profit) as much as they wish.
Etiquette WarsOnce upon issue 64 or so in the Mailbag, we pubbed a note from a cheeky fellow who decided to tell us off about our bad attitude. He also took the tack that we were a single person and that it was somehow our "fault" if a bunch of sensitive souls ever saw it. Obviously there are others in the world who think he was right, but Marko took umbrage with us for being cheeky enough ourselves, to post his message when we replied.
Scofflaws may enjoy reading the offending note and its reply together: http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue64/lg_mail64.html#mailbag/1 and a number of the Gang replying to Marko in issue 78: http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue78/lg_mail.html#mailbag/4 -- Heather
Dear Ben,
thanks for your reply, however I mastered etiquette course (sorry for misspellings) and know very well the difference between vulgar and etiquette.
Much nattering back and forth between Ben and Marko about the ture nature of etiquette (which requires a social context) and the words of gentle society, snipped, because there was not a word about Linux in the lot of it. The closest to a comment about the readership at large were these two tidbits.
from Marko:
Gazette is distributed under free licence and so when people reading it in a computer club (from 8 to 88) they should get a good viewpoint of gazette or bad view point?
No special effort was made to suggest what we should do instead, except to simply never post such things at all. The original reader-by-chance, albeit brash, asked a fair question and we answered him cheerfully, with our policy and the note that if he ever has a Linux question, feel free to ask it. However, there I noted that if you seek formal and professional standards, subscribe to Linux Journal. See the email above and the differenece will be more clear.
and from Ben:
And "vulgar" is a compliment when it comes to the Linux Gazette; we are indeed "of the common people".
The world of the Gazette is that of ordinary people during an ordinary day. Sometimes ordinary people feel like telling us off. For some reason the flames take longer to put out when gentlefolk tell us off instead
If Marko is upset about it being pubbed first in issue 64's Mailbag, I can assure you it won't happen again... since I will no longer publish grammar nor morality flames without Linux content. We have enough of them now that unless our policy changes, we can simply point to these past issues.
I remind readers that this magazine is all about Making Linux A Little More Fun, not ragging on your imperfect neighbors. There are so many languages on this planet that any given puddle of letters could be past tasteless all the way to downright rude in more than one of them. But this magazine is about Linux, not about becoming the international edition of Emily Post. It is quite enough censorship already that I cannot publish all the good stuff that is written by The Answer Gang.
To everyone who has a thought towards correcting our past issues, the license is open, and any copies of LG are free to modify:
- You may make a more pleasant copy of your own
- If you make it publicly available let us know and we will advise the world via our mirrors page.
- If you have specific corrections to apply, send them to us, and we might apply them. In which case all the direct mirrors will see it at their next update. At some months delay, this will also include the major distributions.
- If you're holding a round piece of anodized metal-foil and plastic in your hand, we cannot change what it contains. You'll have to burn a new CD. If you want to disagree with us, consider taking a refresher course in physics... or use one of Linux' many free word processors or layout languages to write up your thesis on matter transformation at a distant location. I recommend LaTeX -- I hear that a lot of scientific journals favor it.
I'm all for making the world a better place; but people have to help each other to do it. -- Heather
re : The Complaint Department: Typos and Grammatical ErrorsBoy, this topic is from the dusty shelf; http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue37/tag/23.html and http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue36/tag/67.html -- Heather
With all of that guy's complaints, I'm reminded of an old advertisement for learning shorthand:
"f u cn rd ths msg..."
u cn us unx.
Cheers, -- Jay R. Ashworth
Point being, that the informational difference between their/they're, or more appropriately, between "kernel core team has soundly reject suggestions that Linux adopt..." and "kernel core team has soundly rejected suggestions that Linux adopt..." as quoted the information content difference is nil, for a native English speaker. Don't let him get too down on you -- we just are pampered by having a MLA in the first place to standardize these issues.
Did you see that Fabor gets famous?Famous? Obviously not famous enough for my name to get spelled correctly!
Hi all! Well, there is this "Is linux dead?" comment on /. and in the MSNBC article (http://www.msnbc.com/news/772215.asp) Fabor is quoted rather extensively. The /. news comment is really bad (doesn't fit at all) but Fabor comes along really nice.
Thansk for the compliment. When I first read the article, I was sounding like Chandler Bing's ex-girlfriend on "Friends"
<Janice>Oh - my - gawd!</Janice>
The article was, IMO, a back-handed compliment.
He should have mentioned TAG though
I think I did.
As a question to fabor: Why do you say (as the article quotes) "It's for geeks"? I mean, we're mostly geeks (ok, all) but those people who write us with questions are most certainly not geeks (most of them) since then they would probably figured out the thing themselves. These lusers might have some probs with "linux" but only because when they buy some win crap they wine to the support stuff of that firm, in GNU/linux they get all the tools at once and don't have such a technical support (suse and redhat for a short time at the beginning, ok..) to ask questions. So they come to us and thats what TAG is for. Bit I think that most luser get along with GNU/Linux pretty well given the fact that GNU/Linux is far more powerful and customizable. With most questions they come to either us or debianhelp for example, they wouldn't even ask those questions on win since there they wouldn't get the fix idea to run their own webserver just-for-fun since there it isn't that much free (as in beer) software to play with (that sentence is rather crap, granted, but I hope you get my general drift) -- Robos
I'll disagree to the extent that there is plenty of free-as-in-beer or shareware available for Windows, but to a certain degree you have to be geeky to know where to go looking for it. Been there, showing people cool stuff like virtual desktops and icon managers and replacement command shells. -- Heather
Well, you really need to hear the question I was asked! I was asked "Why is Linux popular in the enterprise and with upper management but not popular on home PCs?"
"It's for geeks and they thrive in the enterprise where the power of Linux is appreciated." Then I went on to mention about MS licensing practices taht forbid other OSes or changing of the boot sequesnce. I said THAT was why Linux isn't popular on the desktop. I even mention BeOS and Hitachi.
So, to make it clear: I think with a little help (about as much as you need in the beginning with windoze) and some distro like suse or mandrake a pretty normal user can now easily use linux and the accompained software (as long as they can and are willing to read).
I agree. And while my student/attendee, Dave Potter, did say those things, he came off alot different than the article sounds.
Anybody know of a course in "how to answer a journalists' questions without being misrepresented?"
-- Regards, Faber
What Robos had to say only works if you know what parts they are likely to misrepresent. Make them repeat it back. Squeeze 'em if they can't get it right. Unfortunately the cultural gap is likely to foster addiitonal assumptions based on whatever you say or do to try and keep matters straight.
If people don't want to understand, we can't make it happen. That's the real nature of freedom, folks. But we can say things our way in our own venue, and when they come looking for us, it'll still be here.
Remind me to ask Faber's question in the press room at LWE though... -- Heather
ask-the-gangCompliments to Ben for continuing to make tag/ask-the-gang.html better and better.
Thanks much! I treat it as a serious resource, and try my best.
Gosh, this is twice I've complimented Ben in one week. I promise it won't happen again.
"I guess his heart just couldn't stand the shock - we've got syncope and V-fib. All right, lets give him the whole 200j. ... Sync off... CLEAR!" <BZZZZT!>
"OK, got paced rhythm and pulse. He'll prob'ly pull through if he doesn't get any more of those compliments..."
-- Ben
Too many compliments? Just stack them over there next to the groceries, and I'll add them to the virtual beer and munchies in the Answer Gang fridge. (See tag/members-faq.html for more about the fridge.) No fuzzybears were harmed in the writing of this document -- Heather