Re: Next openSUSE

On Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:39:22 +0100, David Bolt <blacklist-me@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"c't", the German magazine, brought out 2 CDs with photography as topic.
Perhaps you can find them.

Any idea on the issue number/date?

1) #19, 3.9.2007 of "c't", contained a "Foto-Worksop"

2) #17, 3.8.2009 of "c't", contained a "Foto-Worksop"

3) "c't special 01/2009 - Digitale Fotografie"



As a normal user I am too handicapped. So I pull out the cable and do the
copying between the systems as root.

You shouldn't need to be root to do any copying.

Some things like other "home" or "root" directories a normal user can't touch.
SO I HAVE TO do that a s root. Also external HDDs, etc, pose problems.

One of the most idiotic stuff was when copying from HDDs or partitions of
Windows systems and even root was not allowed to copy. For reasons I do not know
files were set to not readable. I first did not know that and wonder why the
system CLAIMED to have copied, but didn't. Wat I really hate is that Linux does
not TELL you if something does not work. That is absolutely intolerable


To put it there I can do it from the "higher"
system, i.e. from 11.1 to 10.3. SuSE 9 does not want to read the 11
partitions.

I manage to copy files between SuSE 9.1, SuSE 9.3, openSUSE 10.2, 10.3, 11.0
and 11.1. I've never needed to be root to do so, and almost all of them have
access to the others NFS exports using auto-mount to mount and un-mount them
as required. The only one that the others don't have access to is the one
still running 9.1. It's a very slow system, with limited space, and its sole
job now is to act as a place for my router to send it's logging output.

It was no problem to access SuSE 10 partitions from Suse 9. But with SuSE 11
there is something strange. SuSE 9 can't reat those. Not even as root.


Generally, I use a text editor (nano) and copy one of the pre-existing
sections. I rename it and then change whatever needs to be changed, save
it out and then test it by rebooting. Quick, simple, and easier than using
YaST to do it.

That is my idea too.


This is what I do now, yes. But some parameters do not work as intended.
So I have to find out, what is behind them.

They do here. Are you sure it's not a case of them not working as you think
they should? I'm sure that by now you realise that computers are very good
at doing what they're told, even when what they're told to do isn't quite
what we want them to do.

The installers are a plague by abuse a large part of the screen with some
"helping" words. But they do not help, they only spoil space on the screen. And
they do not give an understandable explanation of the details.


While fighting with the
Sabayon load I had to dissect what these strange an long (!) parameters
meant. Some sports start counting with 0, some with 1.

Grub counts from 0, hd0 is the first drive and hd0,0 is the first partition
on the drive. On the other hand, fdisk and every other partitioner I've
used, start counting the partitions from 1. IIRC, so did LILO.

There is this (0,1) (1,3) stuff, etc. I prefer to do it hands on with an editor.
There I have ALL visible, not only some parts, and I can copy large portions.


Then the HDD was
addressed with an identifier and not with the number of the partition.

That was a really nice thing the kernel developers did. It mucked up things
for me, at least for a while, until I started naming the various file
systems and mounting them by using the name.

There is absolutley no use for that. There is hda, and so the machine shall take
hda. Take a sooooooo very long disk name identifier is crap. That thing is hda,
and that's it. If I had a system with a large base of HDDs, then the identifiers
would be okay, but not with a system of 4 or 5 HDDs.


I would not mind if I had to enter the absolute track number of a
partition start, but THIS is crap. It forces people out of maintaining
their machines by hand into "obey your installer!".

You can do exactly that. Start off the installation and, when it gets to
display the software license, use CTRL-ALT-F2 to get to a console. You can
then start up fdisk and create your own partitioning. Then, once you've
written the partitioning to disc, swap back to the GUI (ALT-F7), and carry
on. When it gets to propose the partitioning, use the "Create Partition
setup" button, then use the "Expert partitioner" to customise it. Here
you'll be able to use the partition layout you created, or import them from
a previous installation.

I did not know that at the tiem of installing it is possible to switch to
another console. I prepared the HDD (or not) and when the installer came to
partitioning, I had to fight with the "expert partitioner" and force it to use
the existing partition table. The "suggestion" of the partitioner are nuts.

The problem at this stage of installation is, that these (vital) things are
hidden, so that a novice is forced into the automatic installer mess.


Because it caters for people who know exactly what they're doing, people
that have some idea what they're doing, people who think they know what
they're doing, and for people who wouldn't know what they were doing if
someone were to give them instructions on what to do, with nice little
cartoon illustrations, that even a 2yo. could follow.

I know what I want to do, and I have to fight against the stupid installers who
with most stupid mess all the time hinder me to get the parameters set to the
values I want.

The whole process of installation is annoying. I all the time have to start from
zero, and each time the installer wants to mess up partitioning. One thing is so
idiotic, I could vomit. The partition I want to use for / all the time must be
formatted. The installer insanely insists on formatting. without formatting it
refuses to write an fstab. But there are situation when ALL is okay, ONLY the
fstab has to be repaired. But the system refuses to do that.


Another exmple: try to install PC-DOS 7, Win XP, and Suse 11.1 on a HDD.
The problem: all the tools you will see, will not work. The biggest fun
was a tool to read an MBR. That of course has 512 bytes. But the tool
wrote amazing 516 Bytes...

I'm not sure what you were using to do that, but I know that the one in SUSE
doesn't. Don't know about the one for PC-DOS or WinXP, especially since I no
longer have it installed.

It was a tool written for DOS. Some 10 years or so ago.


After I found how and why all these tools mess up, I did it the tough way.
I now use the SuperGRUB-CD for booting, etc - and a Suse 11.1 reloaded
installer DVD as the main tools. dd is the only tool I found which does
not mess up the MBRs. And I use the fdisk from Linux to "hammer in the
bolts" of the MBRs, because both DOS and Win XP mess up terribly.

Windows installer is a sodding pain. At least the Linux tools for
manipulating the partition tables wait until you've completed making the
changes you desire, and decided you really want to make those changes,
before they actually write them out. The Windows installer makes the changes
there and then, which means if you delete a partition and then change your
mind, you'd better know just where it was on the disc, and the partition ID,
because you're going to need that information to recreate it using one of
the Linux partitioning tools.

The WIn XP installer raped partition 1, which is a FAT partition. The Win XP
must reside in partition 2, because DOS must be in 1.

Win XP spoiled the MBR *AND* it spoils everything it can get its smeary hands
on. In earlier days working programs in other partitions were erase or disabled,
partly by application programs.


That said, fdisk won't do anything more that write partition changes. It
doesn't do anything else to the MBR. Grub and LILO also write to the MBR,
but they don't touch the partition table, so only change the first 480ish
bytes.

I am glad that the Linux fdisk can change the types of partitions. This way I
changes from DOS to some strange UNIX type WIn XP did not dare to touch. So the
partition 1 it left as it was. After Win XP was installed, I set the type back
to DOS.


Win XP is ***, but I have to install it because of some hardware which
depends on a real Win XP running. And because some programs could cause
heavy load, which a system with only 1 GigaByte of RAM, running with SuSE
11 and VMware could not handle.

Memory is cheap. Throw in as much as the motherboard can handle.

I would, but the maximum for thsi special hardware is 1 Giga. No way to expand.


It would be
a benefit to all the various OSes you run. Well, unless you're running the
32bit version of XP and have more than 3GiB installed. While it can easily
support more than that using PAE, it's specifically been restricted so that
it won't see any more than 3GiB.

What is the special point of PAE or not PAE? I have no idea what it is and how
it works. I only saw yesterday a remark about security. My problem is that I do
not know if VMware accepts such kernel things of if - in certain situations -
things get messed and the system makes a mess or simply gets stuck.



A combination of netstat and ps should tell you.

PS makes me angry as the lines are not wrapped and the screen is too smal
to show me what I want to see.

Try piping it through less. The lines are no longer truncated and so you get
to see almost all the command lines passed to them. You won't see it all
though, usually things like passwords that have been passed on the command
lines are masked out.


Also, I see THAT a program runs, but I have
no idea, why it sows, and WHAT it does.

You could try killing them one at a time and see what happens.

HA! I did that quite often. Some times it was no good idea. ;O)

The worst is
that your system will shut down and need to be restarted. Alternatively,
have a look through /etc/init.d/rc3.d and /etc/init.d/rc5.d for files that
start with 'S'. These start most of the services during the boot process
and, since they're plain text, you can read the comments to find out what
they do.


netstat I never used. I have to look at that.

It's useful for finding out what program is making connections, either
TCP/IP or UDP/IP, or via Unix sockets. For things going over your DSL
connection, you'd be looking at the TCP and UDP connections.

I looked at some monitoring stuff (longer ago), but was not happy. Those tools
show the bits and bytes. I want to knwo WHO is "knocking" at the door, WHO are
the packets sent to in the internet.



You didn't look to see what issues others were having before you
installed?

I made a clean space (partition) and installed from scratch.

I meant that you hadn't looked to see if other people were having issues,
what those issues were, and what solutions were suggested to get
around/solve those issues.

The problems that I have, they won't understand. And the things that they
discuss do not interest me. They only have small systems, many guys are wild at
hacking with parameters. I must not change too much of the parameters etc,
because that reduces system stability, and I use the computer as a machine to
work with.

Those guys in the forums tell you that their system "is stable and runs
perfect", but they do not tell you that they install it anew every few weeks
because they mess up. The just do not realize that they are toying and that I
have a production machine for heavy load.


The only useful exception were the new-groups VMware.


Yes and no. Trying to download stuff from some sites requires that you to
have a referrer, and it also has to match up or they won't let you do the
download.

I don't deal with download sites, but with people who are extremely
paranoid, so that they analyze the traces of the visitors. If I get some
links from the outside, I MUST hide that. WITHIN the web-site the referrer
does not bother me.

If you're linking to off-site pages, there are anonymous redirectors
available. Or you could write and host your own. All it taks is a small
amount of PHP and you can redirect to the various pages and there won't be a
referrer passed on. Create a page, maybe called redirect.php, with something
like this:

<?PHP
$where=$_GET['where'];
if($where=="")
{
echo "Nowhere to go.";
exit;
}
header("refresh: 1;url=".$where);
?>

Thank you.

But the problem is not wíth web-pages that I make, it is things like emails etc,
which contain links. For all of this I have no way of blocking or changing.


What would be very fine to have is a proxy, but my web hoster forbids that in
the TOS.


I hadn't noticed that Firefox now rescales images as it zooms.

IIRC they started with that only a short time ago. Before, they only
scaled text.

That I had noticed. I can't say that it not rescaling images was an issue
for me.

There are 2 reas where it is most important: navigation and pictures.

Very often navigation is down with buttons or maps. But the idiots who make
such, sit in front of their monitor with the nose glued to it. People who have,
say 70 cm distance and use a higher resolution, only see some small spots on the
screen which are undecipherable.

The same is valid for picurre, where some "coloured area on the screen" is
notenough. One has to see the details - but one can not. All is too small.


Been there, done that. The last time was compiling a kernel on a 486 with
24Mb of RAM. I don't think it was very happy about doing that.

Well, that is okay. You give the machine a job and it chews on it. But in
case of Opera it out of a sudden got insane, ran wild on the HDD, and no
access was possible. My first thought was that some hacker had wrecked the
machine. But - as I found out - the cache is the problem. If I clear the
cache, then the machine behaves. The problems occur when the cache gets
full.

Maybe shrinking the size of the cache would help. If you're saving things
from the cache, you'll just have to remember to extract them sooner than
before.

No, the other way round. If I could expand it (like in earlier days) above the
stupid 400 MB barrier, then there would be no problem at all. I can handle all
these things alone, but these bastards tread me like an idiot and make the
system much too smal - and their shitty algorithms really do mess up.


So why on earth do you continue to use a piece of software that is pissing
you off so much?

For 2 reasons:

a) It does some things better than the other browsers and

Apparently, it's also doing some things far worse than others.

No. The other programs are worse. One problem is the cache. Many peopel liek
Firefox. I don't. And I cannot use it because it spoils the cache by dumping
everything into a handfull of files, instead using original files.


Some details: The font panel has wires, which lead over the bus backplane
to a RAM board with static 8k Byte RAM. There is no other means to access
the "write-protect" flip-flop on that board, not on the board, not on any
other bord, not on the front-panel. And there is no connection of that
front flip-flop to the address bus or the data bus of the computer.

IT CANNOT BE ADDRESSED OR WRITTEN TO BY SOFTWARE.

But I did it. With a bug in the software .. and the whole program, which
was BY HARDWARE write-protected in that RAM, was gone.

That is the short description. Now guess what happened. ;O)

There must have been a way to write to it using software, probably using a
specific combination of instructions to toggle it. By the sounds of it, it
was something they had no idea could be done.

Yes, that's real magic. ;O) There is no connection at all between the processor
and that flip-flop. The only electrical connection is with those lines from the
front panel, and there is a mechanical switch. The output of the flip-flop is
blocking the WRITE-input of the RAM. Also there, there is no access by the
processor in any way.

And still, I did it by sofware. ;O)

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