Linux Gazette... making Linux just a little more fun! Copyright © 1996-97 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. _________________________________________________________________ Welcome to Linux Gazette! (tm) _________________________________________________________________ Published by: Linux Journal _________________________________________________________________ Sponsored by: InfoMagic S.u.S.E. Red Hat Our sponsors make financial contributions toward the costs of publishing Linux Gazette. If you would like to become a sponsor of LG, e-mail us at sponsor@ssc.com. _________________________________________________________________ Table of Contents December 1997 Issue #23 _________________________________________________________________ * The Front Page * The MailBag + Article Ideas + Help Wanted + General Mail * More 2 Cent Tips + Spinning Down Unused HDs + Finding What You Want with find + Cutting and Pasting Without a Mouse + Slow Modem + Finding Strings with find + Another Calculator Tip + Upgrading a Laptop Hard Disk + Wallpaper + PostScript + Linux Virtual Console Key Sequences + Netscape Hidden "Easter Eggs" * News Bytes + News in General + Software Announcements * The Answer Guy, by James T. Dennis + Running Multiple Instances of X + VC Madness + Linux and OSPF + Security Problems with pop3 + Cryptographic System + An Interesting De-Referencing Problem + Reminder! + pcmcia ide Drives + KDE BETA 1 + Compression Program + loadlin + WipeOut * Boulder Linux Users Group, by Wayde Allen * Clueless At The Prompt, by Mike List * COMDEX/Fall '97, by Carlie Fairchild * Configuring procmail with The Dotfile Generator, by Jesper Pedersen * Graphics Muse, by Michael J. Hammel * Linux Benchmarking: Part 2 -- Practical Concepts, by André D. Balsa * New Release Reviews, by Larry Ayers + Comfortable Ftp + TkMan * Processes on Linux and Windows NT, by Glen Flower * Roll your own DBMS?!?, by Idan Shoham * Unioncamere Emilia-Romagna: an Italian Public Administration Using Linux, by Giamaolo Montaletti * Weekend Mechanic, by John Fisk * x3270 and Linux, by Chris Mason * The Back Page + About This Month's Authors + Not Linux The Answer Guy The Weekend Mechanic _________________________________________________________________ TWDT 1 (text) TWDT 2 (HTML) are files containing the entire issue: one in text format, one in HTML. They are provided strictly as a way to save the contents as one file for later printing in the format of your choice; there is no guarantee of working links in the HTML version. _________________________________________________________________ Got any great ideas for improvements! Send your comments, criticisms, suggestions and ideas. _________________________________________________________________ This page written and maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com _________________________________________________________________ "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!" _________________________________________________________________ The Mailbag! Write the Gazette at gazette@ssc.com Contents: * Article Ideas * Help Wanted * General Mail _________________________________________________________________ Article Ideas _________________________________________________________________ We're back in business after a one month gap--no November issue--and we need articles from you. So, all you budding authors and Linux users out there, send me your material. Don't depend on our regular authors to fill the gap. We want to hear about all the neat tips and tricks you've found, as well as all the neat applications you are writing or working with. We also like to hear how you are using Linux as a workplace solution. --Editor _________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 06 Oct 1997 01:40:46 +0100 From: Emmet Caulfield emmet@indigo.ie Subject: Newbie Stuff Hi, I've noticed recently that there's an increasing volume of questions on fairly elementary topics to your help page. There's probably a fairly large volume of readers, like myself, who correspond with the querants offering help, pointers, and suggestions in the hope that they may be useful. I'm NOT an expert, by any stretch of the imagination, being a recent "convert" of only 10 months vintage. I think that there is an argument for the Gazette running a series of articles outlining a step-by-step setup procedure specifically targetted at people setting up Linux on home machines connected over the POTS in spite of the fact that this would be duplicating efforts elsewhere (in HOWTOs and such). Just a suggestion. I love the Gazette, you have struck a fine balance well - there is something for everyone. I read 22 "cover to cover". Keep up the good work, Emmet _________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 15 Oct 1997 18:28:05 -0700 From: Todd Martin zombie@ted.org Subject: System Back up I would love to see an article on backing up a Red Hat 4.2 system onto a SCSI Tape drive. I'm having trouble with it, and am finding information on it rare if not impossible to find. If anyone could point me in the right direction I would appreciate it. Or contact me direct if its easy enough to explain. Thanx _________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 13 Oct 1997 21:13:24 -0500 From: "Cochran" scochran@shoalsnet.com Subject: Article Idea Hello, I'm a Linux newbie so please forgive any inaccuracies. :) I think someone should report on the Linux game scene. Different projects that are dealing with game projects like GGI and the Linux GDK. Keep the good work up everyone. Micah _________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 18:54:41 -0500 From: Glenn Meuth manderflawaxe@Dynasty.Net Subject: LJ Howto get TECH Info for NEWBIES I have been reading LJ recently, and I would like to request that an article be written. I have recently had (2) problems which I researched, and only seemed to find dead ends for. I purchased a new computer recently :-) and, as is probably common with such, had some unsupported hardware. This did not surprise me, having worked with computers for some time. So I proceeded to search hardware listings, currently active projects, etc in order to find an answer, and found nothing. (My problem was with my UDMA harddrive controller card from Promise.) I began to email news groups and Promise trying to get the information I needed to write the code for the controller card myself. I could not seem to dig up any help on the subject of support for new hardware. My question: Could you please address an article on how to go about attaining the information necessary to code this? Q(2) Could you also address how to get involved in the linux project? I have tried to get involved with projects (I am a relatively new C++ programmer (2 years)), in college, and there is little for me to do in my area of the USA in order to exercise my C & C++ skills. If you could help me out here I would appreciate it! Glenn Meuth _________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 5 Nov 1997 04:11:55 -0800 (PST) From: Ron Culver ronc@earthlink.net Subject: COMMENTS/SUGGESTION Hi Folks, First want to say I'm really glad the Gazette is on line... what a great source for finding out new things! Keep up the great work - it's a real winner. Next, want to suggest some needs on this end you might find useful as an idea for a feature. I run a real tiny ISP biz in NM (my hometown, but live in CA) - and have LOTS of questions related to running the system (do sysadmin via telnet) - primarily system security issues, keeping the email system running right, HTTPD (actually run Apache) questions, and DNS issues. What has most plagued me is the lack of a fresh source of info to keep the system on the 'cutting edge' of new developements in software. One example is Java, something that came along shortly after the server was first installed, which I can not seem to get to run properly - and to date no one can tell me why. What I would like to see you try is a column that addresses the questions/concerns of small POP's or ISP's - actually anyone who is running Linux as a server on line would have similar questions/concerns. Have a nice.... Ron Culver _________________________________________________________________ Help Wanted _________________________________________________________________ Date: Sun, 12 Oct 1997 02:34:26 +0200 From: Guillermo S. Romero famrom@ran.es Subject: Clipboard Ideas Hello: I am a bit new to Linux and my programming skills are poor (time solves everything), but I have brain (well, 2 overclocked neurons) and I think that Linux (and Unix) have a problem with "cut & paste", aka clipboard. GPM is fine, xclipboard too, some other systems also work, but its hard to move from one system to another, and not all data can be copied. I want to start a team to implement a clipboard in Unix, maybe using files stored under something like /tmp/clip/ (or another /dev/foo?). :] The main thing is that it should be able to work with text, graphics and binary (archives, ie), like other OS do. I think that if we use a system based in /dev/ , the system will support old apps (you only have to save to the correct place emulating an app behaviour, and a demon will convert non standard files to the ones supported by the clipboard). We can even made the new clipboard a multiuser one. Or one with multiple buffers per user (like Emacs, doesn't it?). If someone is interested, just write. I have a draft so we can start the discussion now. I must admit that my idea maybe look mad or too simple, but that only demonstrates that I believe that usefullnes is directionaly proportional to simplicity. :] GSR _________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 11:10:08 -0500 From: Dan E. Collis dcollis@marine.usf.edu Subject: Adaptec 2940 UW adapter I am drowning! Have called Adaptec to no avail. They say they're not supporting Linux. Have tried all the loc's on redhat.com that I can find and have had no luck. Is there a driver available for an Adaptec 2940UW that's good for RedHat 4.2? I'd sure appreciate some help on this one. Many thanks, dcollis@marine.usf.edu _________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 12:23:45 -0700 From: Chad Peyton chadly@cs.WNMU.EDU Subject: PPP I'm trying to configure a ppp connection. So far the program mgetty has got most things working. I don't know much about Linux, but this is what I think I need to do: get the shell to run the following command. Puser - - /usr/sbin/pppd auth -chap +pap login kdebug 7 debug But notice the message I get below when I call in: Red Hat Linux release 4.2 (Biltmore) Kernel 2.0.27 on an i486 login: chad Password: Last login: Fri Nov 7 15:36:54 on ttyS0 Warning: no access to tty (Not a typewriter). Thus no job control in this shell. It says that the shell isn't working or something. Do I need to get tty working or what? How do I do that? Also, after I logout the program quits on me. Is there a way to make mgetty keep working after someone hangs up? Also is there a way to make mgetty load at boot time? Can you help me PLEASE, Chad _________________________________________________________________ Date: Sun, 09 Nov 1997 00:46:33 -0200 (br> From: Javier Salem bbscom@totalnet.com.ar Subject: I need some help I'm new using Linux but I learn so quicky. I just downloaded Communicator for Linux tar version and did all the installation steps, but I don't understand how to set the environment variable setenv. I think that it's my problem because I can't see Netscape when I open xwin, so I can't use it yet My name is Javier from Argentina. I 'll be pleased if somebody could give me a hand. Really thanks. _________________________________________________________________ Date: Sat, 08 Nov 1997 09:37:44 -0800 From: Ted Rolle ted.rolle@usa.net Subject: Accessing Win95 vfat drive I've compiled vfat support into my 2.0.31 kernel. How do I mount the drives so Linux can "see" the Win95 partition? _________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 08 Oct 1997 13:47:17 PDT From: "HoonChul Shin" hoonchul@hotmail.com Subject: Video woes Greetings to every Linux lover! When I run XFree86 ver. 3.2 with resolutions more than 640x340, and open menus and move windows around, I see white lines or streaks in my screen. It's very annoying. And when I exit Xwindows, and return to text mode, screen becomes impossible to read. Fonts just become nasty. Is there anyone out there with same problems that I am having now? Video Card= Trident TGUI 9682 with 2 mb. Thanks! Hoon Chul _________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 12:51:25 +0200 From: Ihab Khoury ikhoury@jrol.com Subject: NetFlex driver.. Greetings, I am trying to install RH4.2 on a compaq Proliant 2500. I have a NetFlex card built in and unable to read it..I saw that few poeple have posted this before ..I was not able to find the driver. Please e-mail me at ikhoury@jrol.com if you have any solutions. Thank you in advance. _________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 11:52:48 +0100 From: Sven Goersmann goersman@student.uni-kassel.de Subject: scanner driver or scanner codes for RELISYS Infinty/Scorpio VM3550 Hi everybody there! I just want to ask you if you know there's a Linux scanner driver for the RELISYS Scanner Scorpio VM3550 from the Infinity series, and if so where can I get it. Thanks in advance, Sven. _________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 13:32:34 -0000 From: Roger Farrell rogerf@icon.co.za Subject: Emulators Hi, I am looking for emulators that support the 8088 and 80188 chips. lf you can help please reply. Regards Roger Farrell _________________________________________________________________ Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 02:08:44 PDT From: Gilberto Persico g_persico@hotmail.com Subject: Transaction Processing Have you ever heard of Transaction Processing systems (such as CICS or Encina or Tuxedo) available (free or commercial) for Linux ??? _________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 03 Nov 1997 19:06:53 +0100 From: Fabrizio fabrizio@euro2001.com Subject: chat HI! I am looking for a chat program for Unix. Can you send to me some tips about this? Thank you and best regards. Fabrizio Piccini _________________________________________________________________ Date: Sun, 2 Nov 1997 02:04:28 +1100 (EST) From: Shao Ying Zhang s2193893@cse.unsw.edu.au Subject: Sorry! - RE: SB16 and MIDI I am sorry for this second mail; I forgot to tell you what the problem is. OK, the problem is that it plays without returning any errors, but simply no sound comes out. Thanks very much! I am using Sound Blaster 16 for my system. My Linux version is Redhat 4.2 with the kernel 2.0.30. I recompiled the kernel properly (I think) to make my SB16 work. It now can play wave, mod, CD but NOT MIDI. I can only use timidity to convert them into wave and then play. This means that /dev/sequencer does not work properly. I have also noticed that a couple of other friends have the same problem. Could you help me PLEASE??? Thanks in advance! Shao Zhang 2/896 Anzac PDE Maroubra 2035 Australia _________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 19:51:44 +0900 From: "Chun, Sung Jin" ninja@aerohel.snu.ac.kr Subject: [Q] PCMCIA IBM CD-400 Help me. I want to access cd-rom using my IBM cd-400 PCMCIA CDROM. But I don't know how can I do this. Please help me. _________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 14:07:47 -0800 From: "Possanza, Christopher" norvien@halcyon.com Subject: HELP! Possible to use parallel port tape drives with linux? Does anyone know if it's possible to use parallel port tape drives to backup a Linux system? I've got the HP Colorado T1000e drive, and I'd love to be able to use it... Any suggestions? Christopher Possanza _________________________________________________________________ General Mail _________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 06 Oct 1997 18:24:12 GMT From: Harry Baecker hbaecker@island.net Subject: Word Processing & Text Processing In his article in Issue 22, subject as above, Larry Ayers indulges in the requisite Unixworld denigration of word processor software and its users, as contrasted with the virtues of software "which allows the writer to focus on content rather than appearance". I suggest that there are some errors in this ritual obeisance to received wisdom. The first is that all who yearn for the services of a word processor lust to inflict another Gibbon, "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", or Russell & Whitehead "Principia Mathematica" upon the world. Were that so then the world would be more than hip deep in rejected typescripts already. Rather, I, and I am sure most others, wish to prepare snailmail with some attention to personalised format and typography, which is exactly what a reasonable word processor provides. I certainly do not look for the archetypal offense in Ayers' universe of discourse, Microsoft Word for Windows. I have borrowed, used, and rejected that, and I have owned, and given away AmiPro (WordPro) and abhorred Word Perfect since its inception. What I would like to use in Linux is some clone of Wordpad, of MS-Write, or of the word processors included with MS-Works or ClarisWorks, wherein I can govern not only the content but also the appearance of my message. It is true that Lyx seems to be a reasonable compromise, unless you find, as I do, that the assumptions built into its templates are displeasing to the eye. The second error is to assume as gospel the correctness of Unix conventions for ASCII text. The ASCII encoding was officially adopted by ISO in 1964. That included provision for the CR/LF pair, and a functional backspace (not left-erase). Anyone familiar with hardcopy terminals of the time, such as Flexowriters, will also remember the joys of "line reconstruction" procedures, to encode, say, lines of Algol 60 program text, in a useful internal representation. Tortuous, but that's what we expect computers to do for us. The text representation conventions of Unix were born together with the limited representational capabilities of video terminals, character generators with limited repertoires, no "backspace and overtstrike" abilities, hence no way of effecting backspace or CR. By the time proper graphic facilities, and hence font choices, became available the Unix conventions for ASCII text had ossified, and the flexibility actually made available by the original ASCII conventions were treated with disdain. Had Unix embraced the full flexibility offered by the ASCII encoding then things might have been otherwise. Harry Baecker _________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 14:26:20 -0400 (EDT) From: Paul Lussier plussier@baynetworks.com Subject: Thanks! Hi, I've been reading the LG since issue 1 when I first stumbled upon John Fisk's web page from an Alta Vista search for Linux info. All of you at SSC have done an unbelievably outstanding job with both LJ and LG, and I just wanted to say thanks. I look forward to the first week of every month when there is a new LG to grab off the net, and a new LJ waiting in my mailbox. I read them both cover to cover each and every month. I do Unix sysadmin for a living and still benefit from so much of what is originally written with Linux in mind and am able to reuse it on other "Unices" as well. Also, I just checked out CANLUG On-line magazine. It's not bad. Maybe you people (and the rest of us too) who have done such a terrific job with LG, can give them a hand getting their's off the ground. After all, the whole spirit of the Linux community is helping one another :) And we can all benefit from another on-line, enjoyable source of Linux news and info :) Thanks again! Happy Linuxing, Seeya, Paul _________________________________________________________________ Date: Fri, 07 Nov 1997 21:05:22 -0800 From: Andrew T. Young aty@mintaka.sdsu.edu Subject: word vs. text processing While reading Larry Ayres's comments (mostly quite sound) about TeX, LOUT, groff, etc., I noticed he was sort of behind the curve on *roff. First, there are several *good* books on this family of text processors. I have troff Typesetting for UNIX Systems by Sandra L. Emerson and Karen Paulsell (Prentice-Hall, 1987), as well as UNIX Text Processing by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly (Hayden Books, 1987). In addition there is a rather specialized book on the tbl pre-processor called something like "setting tables with tbl" -- I don't seem to be able to lay hands on it right now. (I might add that I consider tbl to be considerably superior to LaTeX's clumsy handling of tabular material.) After you read these books, it's easy to make up a set of formatting macros that do for the *roff family exactly what LaTeX does for TeX. You can then invoke these very much the way the LaTeX macros are invoked; indeed translation from the *roff to the *TeX markup is pretty easy at that point (though there are a few subtleties that cause problems). LaTeX has a very few advantages for very esoteric mathematical equations; apart from that, the systems are very similar. Yes, the underlying engine is opaque as hell to figure out; nevertheless, it's powerful and effective. I still prefer *roff to LaTeX, but have been forced to live with *TeX because the journals I use all employ it. One more historical item: Larry called nroff "newer" than troff, but it's the other way around. Originally, there was some formatter called roff (short for runoff); then came nroff for "new runoff" and then *later* came troff for typesetting. -- Andrew T. Young _________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 3 Nov 1997 09:17:40 -0500 From: Jack Chaney jac14@chrysler.com Subject: new_user_setup Hi, I too am a relative newbie (again) to Linux but am sold on a lot of the conceptual aspects of the system (shareware, GNU, free downloads, world wide support, etc.) I am also quite comfortable with the stability and security of the OS. I'm not, however, satisfied with the quality of support for new users or "non-experts." My argument is this, if you are trying to compete in the world market with the IBM's and Microsoft's you need to study what it is that made them so popular in the first place. Availability of applications, which Linux is doing a much better job addressing, is one of the pieces that make them so prominent, but it's only one of the pieces. The popularity of WIN95 in particular is due to the ease of installation of the wanted systems and applications, and the focus on the end user. In the world of computer users the highest percentage of computers are set up as single user systems linked to a network, or some central server and/or ISP. The majority of documentation material for Linux has done an excellent job of describing how to create and maintain the system as a central server, but very little copy is devoted to running Linux as a client station. Red Hat and others have made great strides toward making the install process as painless as possible (my first install attempt was back in the 0.98 days). I am able to get most of the systems up and running but any time I have questions about a particular package, the files it accesses, and where the files reside, is always viewed as a fishing expedition. Also a great deal of software gets installed by the standard install process with descriptive text about what the application is during the install (I can't read that fast), with a memo at the end of installation that a list of what was installed can be found in the log directory. When I went to look at the log what I found was a listing of the package titles that were installed (little more than the filename of the RPM file) and no description about what the package does. I found the HOWTO information, but I tend to work better when I can read the instructions from hard copy while I work with the application on the screen. I could (and do) print out the docs I am working with but the expense of this one-of printing is tedious since I spent extra money to get the documentation. It is also particularly annoying because the documentation has highly detailed chapters on how to recompile the kernel (which isn't broken and works just fine) and little more than a paragraph making reference to creating a dial-up client connection to an ISP (which is what most people want). I am a computer professional who is quite familiar with OS systems and embedded coding and would like to convince management that a Linux-based development environment would be a good new direction for our teams, but it is a hard sell when the response to on-line queries tends to come off as the respondents turning up their nose saying "that information is in the docs" and no clue as to which docs or where. If the respondents know the answer but are tired of answering this question "again" either reprint the old answer, point out where the old answer can be looked up, or answer the question "again," not blow the person off because the question isn't interesting enough. Microsoft and IBM got where they are by taking special interest in always answering the "elementary" questions. I realise the nature of Linux precludes focusing any resources since it doesn't really have any. But if the general Linux public would take a better attitude toward people wanting to join up, and lend a helping hand when possible, Linux could become a major force in the computer industry. Jack Chaney _________________________________________________________________ Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 17:16:04 -0700 From: Felix Liebau fliebau@metronet.de Subject: e mail subscribe? Hi, Thanks for that great journal, Linux Gazette, which I really like to read. Can I subscribe to have new issues mailed to me? Felix Liebau (No, it is impractical to use e-mail to send such large files as those that make up LG--1 to 2 MB total for each issue. However, check out the Front Page for information about our new notification mail list. --Editor) _________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 23:36:43 +0000 From: I.P. Robson p.wyrd@netcomuk.co.uk Subject: More Praise You probably get enough of it. But here's more praise. I've just come accross this magazine and its the most useful and interesting thing I've come across since Linux itself. Sorry to hear about the November issue but this magazine must be so fundamental to everything that isn't Gatesian that you have to keep on going. I wish I had a huge bundle of cash to send you, but you'll have to make do with this E-mail instead. You should have a logo ready to go on every Linux web page everywhere. I don't often gush with praise and I'd be embarassed if any of my gum chewing friends read this. But you deserve it. I.P. Robson -- The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it. _________________________________________________________________ Published in Linux Gazette Issue 23, December 1997 _________________________________________________________________ [ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Next This page written and maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com Copyright © 1997 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun! " _________________________________________________________________ More 2˘ Tips! Send Linux Tips and Tricks to gazette@ssc.com _________________________________________________________________ Contents: * Spinning Down Unused HDs * Finding What You Want with find * Cutting and Pasting Without a Mouse * Slow Modem * Finding Strings with find * Another Calculator Tip * Upgrading a Laptop Hard Disk * Wallpaper * PostScript * Linux Virtual Console Key Sequences * Netscape Hidden "Easter Eggs" _________________________________________________________________ Spinning Down Unused HDs Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 18:34:07 +0100 (MET) From: Philipp Braunbeck 100.182763@germany.net I guess there's no more need to emphasize how much we all like LG. Here's just my humble-newbie-one-and-a-half. If You're like me and You've been upgrading for a couple of years now You're likely to have several HD's on Your IDE- or SCSI-Interfaces. Now there's probably some GNU-Linux-partition and one or more other partitions with M$-stuff on a separate disk. I've got a 120MB Conner (with actually nothing on it, I use it as a backup-device; it used to be win3.1, but I don't need it anymore :-) which is horribly loud. In the old days of DOS one friend of mine wrote a little Pascal-program which would stop the disk after a period of time, and it would only restart on some (hardware?)-interrupt. Some modern BIOSes can do that job for You, but people told me, that either it doesn't work on Linux (because the BIOS is only used on bootup in order to get some basic configuration) or it is not recommended to do so anyway. When I was on some adventure-trip through /usr/sbin, I discovered some new species called "hdparm", which should be included on any major distribution. The manual page says that you can use it to spin down any drive on Your system! All You need to do now is putting a line like "hdparm -S1 /dev/hdb" in some boot-startup-script (I guess the filenames differ in different distributions) and You're done. What a silence! However, You shouldn't do it with Your working /-partition, as it syncs the disk every now and then and the disk will keep starting and stopping, and this is definitely not good for any HD. If You like my 2-cent just go ahead and publish it. If not, there will certainly be a good reason for this. As I am a newbie, i.e. I've been using GNU/Linux for about one year now, I'm humble enough to admit that this hint seems more than obvious to any experienced user. But if You decide to publish it, I'd prefer that I can stay anonymous, not because I got anything to hide, but because I don't want to pretend to be someone I'm not, like a sysadmin or I dunno. I've got too much respect for them guys who are lots more intelligent than I am, but would they ever consider to mail something as primitive as I suggest to LG? It really is a matter of getting started for unexperienced users, finding that GNU/Linux gets even more powerful while sorting it all out. So just put it in "Clueless at the prompt" or where You like. Sign with Your name, You knew the trick anyway, didn't You? _________________________________________________________________ Finding What You Want with find Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 16:14:43 +0000 (GMT) From: Jon Rabone jkr@camcon.co.uk In the October 97 issue, Dave Nelson suggests using find . -type f -exec grep "string" /dev/null {} \; to persuade grep to print the filenames that it finds the search expression in. This starts up a grep for each file, however. A shorter and more efficient way of doing it uses backticks: grep "string" `find . -type f` Note however, that if the find matches a large number of files you may exceed a command line buffer in the shell and cause it to complain. _________________________________________________________________ Cutting and Pasting without a Mouse From: fk5a005@rrz.uni-hamburg.de Date: Wed, 5 Nov 1997 18:58:41 +0100 It is possible, I did think there was no way but there is a way to cut and paste without any mouse. Just use screen-3.6x to achieve what you may have wanted for a long time. you use screen already but did you know how to use this cut-and-paste tool? * Use control-a and ESC to switch on Copy-mode. * "Drive" thru your screen with j,k and all the other well known vi-movements. * Mark the area to copy with the space-key. * Mark the end of the area with a space-key. * Go to another window with e.g. control-a n . * Press control-] where you want the pasting to happen. ready! This was pasting without leaving your keyboard for a while! Control-a can be any key to achieve a screen-3.6 command. There are many more very useful features with screen but i guess that like me there are people out there who may not know this very useful feature. Another hint: It is really worth printing the Manual. If like me you are going by train you can read the Manual x. I found out there are so many important features in so many programs I did not know and that did help me a lot after discovering. About vim and completion: there is a feature that lets you complete words which you did write before which is very, very useful. press control-n in Insert-mode and vim will complete your word if you typed it before. It is even better: You can get vim to complete words that are in a different file. Just tell vim what the name of the file is with :set dictionary=file Then complete the word with control-x-control-k. Now imagine how much easier it may be to get a list of words with a grep command than to write down all kinds of abbreviations and put them into a file. This is a Killer-feature IMO! About emacs and completion: Emacs was first with completion or at least this kind of completion mentioned for vim goes back to 1992. What you need is hippie-exp.el which can perform all kinds of completion. About atchange There is a very nice script out there written in perl. I like it very much because it lets you perform an action whenever you change the date of a file. The action can be almost anything like calling another program and executing things or whatever you want. The idea came from Tom Schneider who has a page about atchange out there: http://www-lmmb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/atchange.html I strongly encourage you to read it, this is an idea, that can really save your time. The perl-script itself is only 68 lines of code. almost one half is explanation, the most important thing is the idea itself but Tom has a good page. So I don't tell you more right now :) _________________________________________________________________ Slow Modem Date: Mon, 3 Nov 1997 17:45:13 -0600 (CST) From:Michael J. Hammelmjhammel@long.emass.com To: Larry E Scheib scheib@tenet.edu In a previous message, Larry E Scheib says: When I access a remote site with Linux my screens paint painfully slowly; a problem I don't experience with Windows95. When my modem connects under Linux it replys "Connected at 38,400", the actual speed of my modem. The modem runs off of cua1, IRQ 3. I'm not very good at debugging modem connections. I've never really had any problems with my dial-ups except when the network itself is bogged down. To be honest, I have no idea how fast my modem connections are actually running. I just know they're tolerable (they actually seem to run quite fast - I have a 33.6 modem). Things that might affect this would be: 1. some other process sitting on cua0 - perhaps a getty? 2. You didn't run setserial, a command to setup your serial ports for use with modems. I've never run this myself, but I know others have had to do so in order to get better throughput. Perhaps its because I don't use MS so my ports are not switched back and forth between MS and Linux settings. _________________________________________________________________ Finding Strings with find Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 16:31:47 +0100 From: Gordon Walker hellcat@easynet.fr Being new to Linux I find the Tips section very useful in general and the tip about searching for a string with find inspired me to write my first conditional Bash script. It finds a string in the current or given directory #!/bin/sh ## Recursively finds all strings in given or current directory ## Usage string_search (dir is optional) ## For example: "string_search fish " finds string "fish" in current directory ## and "string_search /water fish " finds string "fish" in dir ectory /water if [ "$2" = "" ]; then find . -type f -exec grep "$1" /dev/null {} \; else find $1 -type f -exec grep "$2" /dev/null {} \; fi _________________________________________________________________ Another Calculator Tip From: Frank Damgaard frank@diku.dk Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 22:05:14 +0200 (METDST) In issue 21 there was a smart perl based command line calculator, here is another one. I have for some years used a simple alias for the calculator command. The alias only requires awk, and that tcsh (or csh) is the running shell. This alias will not work with bash/sh/ksh since these shells do not allow arguments in aliases. Just place the following line in your ~/.tcshrc or type at the prompt: alias calc 'awk "BEGIN{ print \!* }" ' # When calling calc do not escape "*": # Example: calc (3+5)*4/5 _________________________________________________________________ Upgrading a Laptop Hard Disk Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 14:38:58 -0400 From: Peter Teuben teuben@astro.umd.edu I wanted to upgrade the harddisk of my laptop, which had gotten a bit tight with 800Mb and maintaining both linux and W95 (don't ask). I got a new 2Gb drive, and of course wanted to install W95 as well as linux. I decided, despite my die-hard Slackware, to try RedHat4.2 for linux and basically "copying" W95. Since the laptop is on a local ethernet at home, I could make a backup of W95 on the desktop, and after linux was braught up, restore W95 back over the network. Indeed this worked quite nice, but you have to remember a few tricks. Here were my basic steps: 1. backup, using tar, the old /DOS partition accross the network 2. replace drive, partitioned as dos on /dev/hda1, swap on hda2, ext2 on hda3 and hda4. Don't forget to toggle the bootable flags of hda1. 3. installed linux on hda3, and did 'mkdosfs /dev/hda1' to format the dos partition from within linux (using DOS bootfloppy and FORMAT should work just as well, see my FAT32 caveat below) LILO was installed at this stage to boot linux as well as W95. 4. by default RedHat mounts hda1 as 'dos', but you need to re-mount this still empty partition as 'vfat': umount /DOS insmod vfat mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /DOS 5. untar the previously saved dos.tar back to /DOS, via the network from the desktop machine. Since /DOS is vfat, it will properly keep the long names. 6. reboot the machine with a previously made 'emergency W95 bootfloppy' and run "SYS C:" to restore the bootimage 7. reboot and select W95 from the LILO prompt, and it should all work nicely now (it did for me). Caveat: For FAT32 versions of W95 (from OSR2 or W98) you may need to patch the 2.1.x kernels to include this. _________________________________________________________________ Wallpaper Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 14:38:35 +0100 From: Roger Irwin irwin@mail.com Use netscape, got xv? Try running this script in your home directory: rm -f XVbaa for foo in .netscape/cache/* do for baa in $foo/*.gif do echo $baa >>XVbaa done done xv -root -quit -random -flist XVbaa This will make you a custom wallpaper on the fly by fishing in netscapes cache. I mapped this to my fvwm2 button bar by using the following lines in .fvwm2rc95: *FvwmButtons(Title Mood, Icon exit.xpm, \ Action 'Exec XVchange ') This goes in the FVWM buttons section in the middle of the other lines that define the other buttons.... When I hit the Mood button, the wallpaper changes. I suppose a lazier person might use crontab.... _________________________________________________________________ PostScript Date: Sun, 9 Nov 1997 22:00:31 +0000 (GMT) From: Ivan Griffin ivan.griffin@ul.ie Counting the Number of Pages in a file To count the number of pages in a PostScript file, you are relying on the creator of the file to have been a sociable application and to have followed the Adobe Document Structuring Conventions (ADSC). These conventions entail the automatic placement of comments (%%) in the PostScript source so that additional applications will find it easier (and indeed, possible!) to post-process the PostScript without having to interpret it. They are generally ignored by PostScript interpreters and printers. The comment '%%Page:' delimits each new page. So to count the number of pages in a DSC compliant PostScript file, all you have to do is grep for the number of '%%Page:' markers: grep -c '%%Page:' filename.ps I generally tend to alias this to pspage in my .cshrc alias pspage 'grep -c %%Page:' Printing 2up The utility pstops, part of the psutils package, allows you to process a PostScript file to enable 2up printing. I find the following works for A4 (European) paper -- the measurements will need to be tweaked for US Letter: alias psdouble 'pstops "2:0L@.7(21cm,0)+1L@.7(21cm,14.85cm)"' To use it, it is as simple as: psdouble < 1up.ps > 2up.ps Microsoft Ugly PostScript Quite often in PostScript generated by the Microsoft Windows driver, it requires the interpreter to have 30MB of memory, and refuses to print otherwise!! This is quite incredible, and I have found that it always seems to print perfectly well if this artifical limit is removed. The PostScript in question is: /VM? {vmstatus exch sub exch pop gt { [ (This job requires more memory than is available in this printer.) 100 500 (Try one or more of the following, and then print again:) 100 485 (In the PostScript dialog box, click Optimize For Portability.) 115 470 (In the Device Options dialog box, make sure the Available Printer Memory is accurate.) 115 455 (Reduce the number of fonts in the document.) 115 440 (Print the document in parts.) 115 425 12 /Times-Roman showpage (%%[ PrinterError: Low Printer VM ]%%) = true FatalErrorIf}if} bind def 30000 VM? The line "30000 VM?" checks that (roughly) 30MB of memory is available in the printer. Deleting this line is sufficient to ensure that the check is not performed, and that the job will now print (or be interpreted successfully in ghostview for example). _________________________________________________________________ Linux Virtual Console Key Sequences Date: Sun, 9 Nov 1997 22:00:31 +0000 (GMT) From: Ivan Griffin ivan.griffin@ul.ie Pressing these key sequences on a VC will dump information to the screen. Displaying task information: Ctrl-Scroll Lock gives: free sibling task PC stack pid father child younger older swapper 0 R current 4096 0 0 1 init 1 S FFFFFFFF 2676 1 0 706 kflushd 2 S 00000000 3984 2 1 3 kswapd 3 S 00000000 3976 3 1 4 2 nfsiod 4 S 00000000 3520 4 1 5 3 nfsiod 5 S 00000000 3520 5 1 6 4 nfsiod 6 S 00000000 3520 6 1 7 5 nfsiod 7 S 00000000 3520 7 1 21 6 bash 8 S 00000000 3012 172 164 711 login 9 S 00000000 2820 164 1 172 166 135 kerneld 10 S 00000000 3224 21 1 76 7 login 11 S 00000000 3012 706 1 712 571 syslogd 12 S FFFFFFFF 3192 76 1 85 21 klogd 13 R 00000000 3404 85 1 96 76 crond 14 S 00000000 3480 96 1 108 85 inetd 15 S FFFFFFFF 3464 108 1 119 96 lpd 16 S FFFFFFFF 3376 119 1 135 108 gpm 17 S 000B206C 3368 135 1 164 119 vi 18 S FFFFFFFF 3012 711 172 mingetty 19 S FFFFFFFF 3012 166 1 167 164 bash 20 S 00000000 3012 712 706 724 httpd 21 S 00000000 3460 573 571 574 httpd 22 S 00000000 3600 574 571 575 573 httpd 23 S 00000000 3308 571 1 579 706 171 httpd 24 S 00000000 3600 575 571 576 574 mingetty 25 S FFFFFFFF 3012 167 1 168 166 mingetty 26 S FFFFFFFF 3012 168 1 169 167 mingetty 27 S FFFFFFFF 3012 169 1 171 168 httpd 28 S 00000000 3600 576 571 577 575 update 29 S 00000000 3460 171 1 571 169 httpd 30 S 00000000 3600 577 571 579 576 vi 31 S FFFFFFFF 3012 724 712 httpd 32 S 00000000 3600 579 571 577 Displaying Memory Information Shift-Scroll Lock gives: Mem-info: Free pages: 3136kB ( 4*4kB 0*8kB 1*16kB 1*32kB 0*64kB 24*128kB = 3136kB) Swap cache: add 0/0, delete 231912/0, find 0/0 Free swap: 16596kB 5120 pages of RAM 789 free pages 449 reserved pages 2572 pages shared Buffer memory: 2324kB Buffer heads: 2340 Buffer blocks: 2324 Buffer[0] mem: 1953 buffers, 10 used (last=1953), 0 locked, 0 protected, 0 dirt y 0 shrd Buffer[2] mem: 337 buffers, 25 used (last=337), 0 locked, 0 protected, 0 dirty 0 shrd Buffer[4] mem: 3 buffers, 3 used (last=3), 0 locked, 0 protected, 3 dirty 0 shr dSize [LAV] Free Clean Unshar Lck Lck1 Dirty Shared 512 [ 0]: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1024 [ 186]: 31 1953 0 337 0 3 0 2048 [ 0]: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4096 [ 0]: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8192 [ 0]: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 _________________________________________________________________ Netscape Hidden "Easter Eggs" Date: Sun, 9 Nov 1997 22:00:31 +0000 (GMT) From: Ivan Griffin ivan.griffin@ul.ie These special URLs do interesting things in Netscape Navigator and Communicator. about:cache gives details on your cache about:global gives details about global history about:memory-cache about:image-cache about:document about:hype about:plugins about:editfilenew view-source:URL opens source window of the URL Ctrl-Alt-F take you to an interesting site :-) _________________________________________________________________ Published in Linux Gazette Issue 23, December 1997 _________________________________________________________________ [ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Back Next _________________________________________________________________ This page maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com Copyright © 1997 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!" _________________________________________________________________ News Bytes Contents: * News in General * Software Announcements _________________________________________________________________ News in General _________________________________________________________________ New URL for LG Linux Gazette now has its own domain name! Check out http://www.linuxgazette.com/ as another way to get to LG. Other LG News While we do not mail issues of LG to our readers--it's just too big--we do have an announcement service. Write lg-announce-request@ssc.com with the wordsubscribe in the body, and each month you will receive an e-mail notice when we post Linux Gazette. Our ftp site will now contain each issue after Issue 9 in its own gzipped tar file. Issues 1 through 8 will be together in one gzipped tar file. _________________________________________________________________ Cool Linux Sites of December! Check out the two cool Linux sites of the month! The Rat Pack Underground Network is a must-see. This URL has some practical stories about using Linux to solve "real-life" problems and much more. The Eyes on the Skies Robotic Solar Obsevatory and BBS page contains an internet-accessable robotic solar telescope and BBS system built by Mike Rushford. You can actually control your view of the sun by controlling a telescope from your browser! The telescope control pages are served by a Linux system that is called Eyes on the Skies. _________________________________________________________________ Stand Up and Be Counted The Linux Counter is a serious attempt to count users in the Linux universe. At the moment, more than 53.000 people are registered with the counter, coming from more than 130 different countries. The counter has been recently updated and given a new Web interface and forms design, and is now able to give you the ultimate Linux counter gimmick: The Linux REGISTRATION CERTIFICATE! This little GIF image, with your personal registration number on it, ready for insertion in your Web page, is available for you at the price of filling out the registration form. Older, registered users can go to http://counter.li.org/update.html, enter their registration key, and get it there. Come on folks--STAND UP AND BE COUNTED!!!! _________________________________________________________________ Virtual Services HOWTO Check out the new HOWTO on virtual services which includes a section on virtual mail services as a whole. Go to http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO/Virtual-Services-HOWTO.html The author would like your comments on the HOWTO in order to keep it on track, you can reach him at brian@nycrc.net _________________________________________________________________ Software Announcements _________________________________________________________________ Eiffel Special In celebration of the 200,000th Eiffel Professional license, ISE is making available special limited time offers for new purchases of the Eiffel Professional Licence and upgrades from Personal Eiffel. FREE Upgrade to Eiffel Professional license with NEW Java Interface (see offer for full details) Eiffel Professional Suite $495 * EiffelBench * EiffelBase * EiffelLex * EiffelParse * EiffelVision Eiffel Client-Server Suite $795 * EiffelBench * EiffelBase * EiffelLex * EiffelParse * EiffelVision * EiffelWeb * EiffelNet Eiffel Cross-Platform Suite $895 * EiffelBench * EiffelBase * EiffelLex * EiffelParse * EiffelVision * EiffelWeb * MEL Eiffel Enterprise Suite $1195 * EiffelBench * EiffelBase * EiffelLex * EiffelParse * EiffelVision * EiffelWeb * EiffelNet * MEL * EiffelCase A special bonus runs with each of the above which includes a free upgrade to the next release, a free O-O book and 15% off any ISE training session up to June 1998. The Enterprise Suite also includes a free year of maintenance and support from the date of purchase. _________________________________________________________________ O'Reilly "Animal Book" Contest Readers of the "Animal Books" by O'Reilly now have a chance to see some wild animals close up, courtesy of computer book publisher O'Reilly & Associates. O'Reilly has launched the In a Nutshell contest, with the prize being a trip for two to the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park. Readers of O'Reilly's bestselling In a Nutshell quick-reference books can find entry forms at their favorite bookstores. Completed entry forms must be received by December 31, 1997, and the winner will be chosen on January 30, 1998. Official In a Nutshell Contest Rules: * Completed entry forms must be received by December 31, 1997, in order to qualify. * No purchase necessary to enter. (However, please include original cash register receipt or a legible copy if purchase is made.) * Offer good in USA and Canada. * Not responsible for lost, late, misdirected, or illegible entry forms. * Void where prohibited, taxed, or restricted by law. _________________________________________________________________ Help with JWP There is a Windows application, called JWP -- a Japanese Word Processor. This package was written by Stephen Chung, and as a GNU product it is freely distributable. JWP comes with its own fonts and its own Front End Processor (FEP) which means it is useful on English-only computing systems. It is also integrated with Jim Breen's EDICT Japanese-English dictionary. Unfortunately, JWP is only available for Windows right now, which is locking out a lot of people under other platforms who might benefit from it. As Stephen is quite busy with full-time work and maintaining the Windows versions (he's developing version 2.00 now), there is an attempt being made to go ahead and port to X-Windows. This project will never get off the ground without volunteers. any interested X-Windows developer who wants to make a contribution both to the GNU and Japanese-speaking communities is invited lend a hand with this exciting project. The JWP-Port Project home page contains more information on the JWP package as well as the JWP-Port project itself. If you are interested, please visit the page at http://qlink.qheensu.ca/~3srf/jwp-port. _________________________________________________________________ Perfect Backup+ Personal Edition Unisource Systems, Inc. announced today the release of the famous PerfectBACKUP+ Personal Edition, a fully functional version of their best-selling PerfectBACKUP+ V5.5. Having received continued and tremendous support from the LINUX community, and in recognition of LINUX becoming our #1 best-selling platform we are giving something back. The PerfectBACKUP+ Personal Edition is unrestricted and free to anyone. Its freely redistributable and can be use for either private or commercial use. Information about, and the program itself can be obtained from http://www.unisrc.com. _________________________________________________________________ 86Open Project A group which includes some of the key developers of Unix operating systems on Intel architecture computers have agreed to work on a common programming and binary interface. At a meeting held mid-August at the head office of SCO, participants achieved consensus on a way to create software applications which would run, without modification or emulation, on the Intel-based versions of: * BSDI * FreeBSD * Linux * NetBSD * SCO OpenServer * Sunsoft SolarisX86 * SCO UnixWare The goal of this effort is to encourage software developers to port to the Unix-Intel platform by reducing the effort needed to support the diverse mix of operating systems of this kind currently available. The specification, called "86open", will be published and freely available to any environment wishing compliance. It involves the use of a standardized 'libc' shared library of basic functions to be provided on all systems. This library will provide a consistent interface to programmers, hiding the differences between the various operating systems and allowing the resulting binary programs to run unaltered on any compliant system. Whenever possible, it will be consistent with The Open Group's Single Unix Specification. Each participating operating system will be free to implement the 86open library specification on its own. However, the reference implementation will be based upon GNU's 'glibc' version 2, ensuring that it will remain open and freely available. The actual list and behavior of the 86open functions is presently being determined. Participants in the meeting, who will be involved with the ongoing evolution of the 86open specification, include people deeply involved with the operating systems mentioned in this project. The 86open steering committee, a core of this group which will assemble the work and produce the final specification, comprises: Marc Ewing, Dion Johnson, Evan Leibovitch, Bruce Perens, Andrew Roach, Bryan Sparks and Linus Torvalds For more information, contact 86open@telly.org or check http://www.telly.org/86open. _________________________________________________________________ Clobberd 3.2 Clobberd 3.2 (Clobberd-3.2-RELEASED.tgz) has been released on to the following sites: * ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/incoming * ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/incoming/Linux * http://dayworld.net.au/~jsno/rel/1997 Clobberd is a user/resource regulator that allows Operators to monitor and track users Total Time, Daily Time, Expiration time, Total network usage and Daily network usage (to name a few) in an effort to limit or cost resources that the user uses. Clobberd effectively "meters" resources, and compares them to any limits/conditions you impose. The third version now has the ability to monitor users on a network rather than a single host. _________________________________________________________________ Corel Video Network Computer News When Corel Computer Corp. formally unveils its Video Network Computer later this month, the machine will be running Linux, an operating system that is becoming an increasingly prominent force in workstations linked to corporate intranets. Linux is a compact, efficient, easier-to-use and free version of Unix. A growing number of corporate MIS groups, as well as software developers and systems integrators, are choosing Linux over 32-bit Windows platforms, especially for Internet applications. At some sites, Linux actually is displacing Windows. That is what happened at Unique Systems, Inc., a software developer in Sylvania, Ohio. The company, which puts together accounting systems for small and midsize companies, was using Microsoft Corp.'s Office 95 internally but was plagued by software crashes and other problems. "It really irked me," Unique President Glenn Jackson said. The company tested Applix, Inc.'s ApplixWare office suite on Intel Corp. computers running Linux. Users got nearly all the functionality of Microsoft Office and were able to import all Office files easily into ApplixWare - at much lower cost and with far greater reliability than with Office, Jackson said. "Linux is the true competitor to Windows NT in the long term," said Dave Madden, senior product manager at Corel Computer, a subsidiary of Corel Corp., based here. Linux has a number of key features NT lacks. For example, Linux is a multiuser system and runs on a wide range of processors _ from Intel 386 to 64-bit Reduced Instruction Set Computing chips _ and on multiprocessor computers. The Linux kernel is less than 2M bytes. Linux has other key attractions, according to Jon Hall, executive director of Linux International, a trade group that promotes the software. Linux is free, and users have access to all the Linux source code, which means they can make whatever changes they need. Commercial Linux versions from companies such as Caldera, Inc., of Provo, Utah, and Red Hat Software, Inc., of Research Triangle Park, N.C., range from $49.95 to $399 and usually come with additional software and technical support. The free version of Linux is crammed with utilities and connectivity software. "One of the things that makes Linux so attractive is how much software you get with it," said Dave Parker, a senior software engineer at Frontier Information Technologies, a division of Frontier Corp., a Rochester, N.Y., telecommunications company. "Linux will connect to anything." Much of the free software is available under the "GNU public license," which is administered by the Free Software Foundation. For example, TCP/IP and a Web server are built in, and Linux can run DOS applications. It includes X.11 support, so it can host or access Unix applications. Linux supports the Microsoft Server Message Block protocol, so it can serve Windows files. It also supports AppleTalk for Macintoshes. Using optional software, it can even run Windows applications. Cal-dera's commercial OpenLinux adds Novell, Inc. NetWare connectivity. Frontier Information Technologies' Green Bay, Wis., site is using several Caldera Open- Linux servers as specialized gateways, directory or naming servers and firewalls. This seems to be an increasingly common practice at big corporate sites, said Dan Kusnetzky, director of operating system research at International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass. Unknown to senior MIS executives, operations staff are deploying Linux servers in a range of intranet applications, he said. _________________________________________________________________ Published in Linux Gazette Issue 23, December 1997 _________________________________________________________________ [ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Back Next _________________________________________________________________ This page written and maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com Copyright © 1997 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!" _________________________________________________________________ The Answer Guy By James T. Dennis, answerguy@ssc.com Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/ _________________________________________________________________ Contents: * Running Multiple Instances of X * VC Madness * Linux and OSPF * Security Problems with pop3 * Cryptographic System * An Interesting De-Referencing Problem * Reminder! * pcmcia ide Drives * KDE BETA 1 * Compression Program * loadlin * WipeOut _________________________________________________________________ Running Multiple Instances of X on One Video/Monitor (VCs) From: Guillermo S. Romero famrom@ran.es Hello, I have tried to run multiple X servers with only one card and one monitor. Is this possible, or is it normal that the second X server does not run? I used startx display :0 the first time, and :1 the second. I have a 1024K video board (#9GXE64 PCI, S3 864), and normal config is 8 bpp, 1024*768 virtual desktop, running on a remix of RedHat 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2, with XFree86 as server. Maybe I did not understand the man page (English is not my first languaje). Any suggestion? The normal way this is done is using the form: startx -- :0 & startx -- :1 & ... The -- is used by startx and xinit to separate an optional set of client parameters from the set of display/server options and parameters. If you ran the command: startx xterm -e myprog -- :1 & ... it would start X Windows with a copy of xterm which would be running 'myprog' (whatever that might be). The remainder of the line informs the X server to use display number one (which would be VC -- virtual console -- number eight on most Linux systems). (On my systems it would start on VC#14 -- accessed with the {Right Alt}+{F2} key combination. I routinely configure mine with 24 VC's -- the first twelve of which have "getty's" (login prompts) and the next eleven of which are available for X (xdm's or otherwise), using 'open' commands, or for dumping status output from a process (like 'make' or 'tail -f'). Read the man pages for startx and xinit one more time. I'm pretty sure that the man pages have all been translated into Spanish -- so you might want to hunt those down. Thanks!!! Read the man pages for startx and xinit one more time. Sure, and with a dictonary. ;] I'm pretty sure that the man pages have all been translated into Spanish -- so you might want to hunt those down. Try: man-pages-es-0.2-1.src.rpm: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib/SRPMS/man-pages-es-0.2-1.src.rpm The Spanish Howto is small, too global, sure it does not cover that. And I still have problems with my ntilde chars and acents, Spanish is not supported a lot (Linux or another OS, always late and bad)... The system explained in that howto does not work (but thats another question, whose solution maybe... magic? real support?). GSR I'm afraid I'm completely ignorant of internationalization issues with Linux. I do know that there is quite a bit of work done on Linux boxes in Japan, Germany, Italy and, naturally enough, Finland (where Linus comes from). As bad as it seems -- Linux' support for other languages is probably the best in the world. Unfortunately I don't have the skill or resources to point you to the support and resources you need. Since your English is clearly adequate to discuss these issues with me -- you might consider contributing some of your time to a translation effort (get the LIGS, NAG, and SAG portions of the Linux Documentation project translated, and "beef up" (improve) the Spanish-HOWTO. I highly recommend that you find or start a Linux user's group in your area. This is the best way to help yourself and to improve the situation for all of your compatriots. -- Jim _________________________________________________________________ VC Madness From: frees@technologist.com Hi I have an application that uses its own .cshrc and .bashrc to fire up and this is done by using its own login account. Now what I would really like is for this to say select VC8 to run on and then have my normal X on VC7 as usual. Can this be done? and if so how? --Phil open -c 8 -- su - $PSUEDOUSER ... where PSUEDOUSER is the psuedo users whose .*shrc you want to run. Naturally you can convert the .*shrc into a normal shell script and do whatever you like with it. You have to run this as root -- (so 'su' doesn't prompt for a password) though there are ways to get around that 'runas' is available at the sunsite.unc.edu archive site and its mirrors). If launch this from another UID you'll need to ensure that this users (the launching user, not necessarily the psuedo-user) has write access to /dev/tty8 (group +w should be sufficient). If you want to have the console visually switch to this application's VC you can just add the -s switch like so: open -c 8 -s -- .... ... where the "--" marks the end of 'open's' arguments so that the command that follows it can unambigously get its own arguments. Without the -c switch the 'open' command will select the next available VC. Any subsequent 'startx' commands or other 'open' commands would then pick later ones (unless the others were freed back up). You can have two or more copies of X running on different VC's as well. For example the command: startx -- :1 ... will create a second X session on the localhost:1 display (the first one is addressed as localhost:0 or simply :0). These X sessions can be run under different UID's and have completely different client configurations (colors, window managers, etc). There is also an 'Xnest' command that works similarly -- allowing one X session to run "within" (as through a window on) one of your existing X sessions. You can also set the terminal settings and colors using normal redirection of the form: stty erase ^? > /dev/tty8 ... and: setterm -background blue -foreground yellow -bold on -store \ > /dev/tty8 This last command would set and store a new set of default screen colors for the VC. The setterm command can also be used to control the Linux VC screen blanker's timeout (a value of 0 means "never blank"). Naturally you may want to read the man pages for all of these. If you want to ensure that a given process will *always* be running (and will automatically be respawned when it dies) you can add it to your /etc/inittab -- so that the init process will watch over it. This is how new 'getty' processes are spawned on your first six (or so) VC's when you boot and are respawned when you logout. Likewise if you use 'xdm' to keep a graphical (X based) login prompt on one or more of your VC's. As you can see, its possible to do quite a bit with Linux VC's. I run 12 VC's with getty (as login consoles), have one 'xdm', one devoted to syslog, and ten more available for other purposes (such as 'startx' and 'open' commands and to to use for 'tail -f' commands when need to monitor the end of a status or log file -- from a 'make' or whatever. The second set of 12 VC's is accessed with the *right* {Alt} key. (In case you'd never noticed, the default keyboard settings of Linux only allow you to use the *left* {Alt} key for switching VC's). I set syslog to use VC number 24 with an entry in the /etc/syslog.conf file that reads: *.* /dev/tty24 This puts a copy of *every* syslog message on to that VC -- which is what I switch to for a quick glance and try to switch to when I leave any of my systems unattended. (That way when one does lock -- as rare as that is -- I have some idea of what the last throes of the system were). I set that to bright red on black with the following command in my rc.local file: setterm -foreground red -bold on -store > /dev/tty24 (I also do the same to /dev/tty12 which I customarily use only for root login's). Hope all of that helps. -- Jim _________________________________________________________________ Linux and OSPF From: Jose Manuel Cordova-Villanueva jcordova@amoxcalli.leon.uia.mx Dear Sr. Recenty I had my first contact with the Linux G. and is a big source of information, can you inform me if there are a program that can talk ospf because our ISP, is changing from RIP to OSPF and we have a linux box in one of our links, for our cisco no problem but for our Linux box?? The software you want is called 'gated' (for "gateway daemon"). This is a Unix multi-protocol router package for Linux which includes support for OSPF and other routing protocols (BGP4, IGRP, etc). Here's a link to the top level 'gated' pages Cornell Gated Consortium Information I've heard that compiling 'gated' for Linux is not quite trivial so here is some other links that might help: Here's a link to a source RPM in the Red Hat contrib directory: gated-R3_6Alpha_2-1.src.rpm Here's a threaded archive of the 'gated' users mailing list: Gated-People Archive Here's an odd note about an alternative routing software package/project: Route Servers -- RA.net: routing arbiter project Hope that helps. -- Jim _________________________________________________________________ Security Problems with pop3 of Linux 2.1.29 From: Sam Hillman hillman@easyway.net Well I hope I'm posting to the right person. I have two questions, which I hope you can answer. 1. How do I setup my linux machine as a POP3 server? I can't find any FAQs or Howtos. Usually you don't have to do anything extra to allow access to POP services. Most Linux distributions include a pop server pre-installed and appearing in the /etc/inetd.conf and /etc/services files. A quick test is to login to the system in question and type the command: telnet localhost pop-3 ... it should respond with something like: +OK your.hostname .... (some copyright info) ... and you can type QUIT to get out of that. If that doesn't work you'll want to make sure that the appropriate lines appear in your /etc/services and /etc/inetd.conf files like so: /etc/services: pop-3 110/tcp # PostOffice V.3 pop 110/tcp # PostOffice V.3 /etc/inetd.conf: pop-3 stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd ipop3d If they appear commented out -- remove the leading hash sign(s) (or paste these samples in) and restart your inetd with a command like: kill -HUP `cat /var/run/inetd.pid` 2. When I log on to my ISP, I download my mail and it gets dumped to the sendmail, this creates a situation where the mail is bounced back and forth until it passes the hop limit and is dumped as an error message in the postmaster box, and a nasty letter is send to the originator from MAILER-DEMON... I think this maybe because I'm running a local area network between my two machines, the IP address of the local net is 162.blah.blah... But I also have the IP address the ISP gave me in the host file. If the ISP's IP address is the problem can I remove it from the host file, and just get a duynamic IP when I connect? Thanks in advance! This is a bigger problem. First the 162.*.*.* is probably not what you want to use for you disconnected LAN. There is an RFC 1918 (originally RFC 1597) which describes and reserves a set of addresses for "non-Internet" use. These are guaranteed not to collide with any valid (routable) hosts on the 'net. Here's the list of those addresses: 192.168.*.* (255 class C address blocks) 172.16.*.* through 172.31.*.* (15 class B address blocks) 10.*.*.* (one class A address block) ... use those however you like. Be sure to keep them behind your own routers (make any hosts with those go through an IP masquerading or NAT -- network address translation -- router, or through a SOCKS or other proxy server). The next problem is configuring sendmail for use on a disconnected system. You probably need to define your hostname (or an alias to your hostname) to match what your ISP has named you. Each ISP seems to use a different way to manage these "disconnected sendmail subdomains" -- with no standardization in site (which is why I use UUCP). I gather that some people use a scheme where they only run sendmail when they are connected. The rest of the time their MUA (mail user agents like elm, pine, mh-e, exmh, etc) just drop outgoing mail into the mqueue directory where 'sendmail' will get to it later. One problem I have with these configurations is that sendmail wants to look up these remote hosts. This seems to cause various problems for users of "disconnected" or "periodically connected" (dial-up) systems. So far the only solutions I've found are: recompile sendmail without DNS support (there used to be a sendmail.cf switch that disabled DNS and reverse DNS activity in sendmail -- but that doesn't seem to work any more) use UUCP. UUCP was designed for disconnected (dial-up) and polling systems. It's what I use. The disadvantage to UUCP is that it's a bit hard to set up the first time -- and you have to find a provider that's willing to be your MX/SMTP to UUCP gateway. There are still some people out there where will do this for free or at only a nominal fee. But they are increasingly hard to find. I use a2i Communications in San Jose. You could use a non-local provider if you want to use UUCP over TCP as the transport mechanism (UUCP is pretty flexible about the underlying transports -- you could probably use tin cans and string as far as its concerned). There are several HOWTO's that try to cover this topic. Try browsing through some of these: * ISP Hookup HOWTO: Basic introduction to hooking up to an ISP. * Electronic Mail HOWTO: Information on Linux-based mail servers and clients. * Mail Queue mini-HOWTO: How to queue remote mail and deliver local mail. * Offline Mailing mini-HOWTO: How to set up email addresses without a dedicated Internet connection. * UUCP HOWTO: Information on UUCP software for Linux. * Sendmail+UUCP mini-HOWTO: How to use sendmail and UUCP together. -- Jim Thanks so much for the detailed suggestions. We have installed a newer version of pop3 on our server for now and we will look into the feasibility of implementing some of your suggestions for a final cure. Thanks again, James, we really appreciate it. -Sam Hillman, Service Manager, Easyway Communications. _________________________________________________________________ Cryptographic System From:Emil Laurentiu emil@interlog.com Hello Jim, Sorry for bothering you but I would apreciate a lot an answer even a short one like 'no' :) I am (desperately) searching a crypographic system for my Linux box. I am already using TCFS but I'm not very happy with it for several reasons: it is slow, I experienced some data loss, must use the login password, cannot share encypted files with other users, NFS - increses security riscs. And the people in Italy seemed to have stoped work on this project (latest version is dated february). February doesn't seem that old. Are you sure you're using the latest TCFS (v 2.0.1)? You can find that at: http://pegaso.globenet.it (which is a web form leading to an HTTPS page -- so use and SSL capable browser to get there). If you find it slow than any other decent encryption is also likely to be too slow for you. You could look at http://www.replay.com (in the Netherlands). This has the best collection of cryptography software I've seen anywhere. The two fs level alternatives to TCFS are CFS (Matt Blaze's work, on which TCFS was based) and userfs (which support a few different user-level filesystem types including an experimental cryptographic one. I am wondering if you know anything about an encryption at the file system level. Something like SecureDrive (from DOS :) which did IDEA encryption on the fly at sector level for a partition and was very fast. Are you sure SecureDrive is using IDEA? I rather doubt that. As an (almost) single user on my linux machine something like this would be more apropriate. Of course if I would not find one I'll finish by writing it by myself. My only concern is that I've been a Linux user only for half a year and I did not get the chance to study the kernel to well (this will be a good opportunity :) Why not pick up on the TCFS or CFS work? Why not build on the userfs work (plugging in whatever encryption you like)? Why write it "by yourself" when you can collaborate with other members of the Linux community as they have done to bring you Linux itself, and as the FSF and others have done to bring you the GNU packages which turn Linux into a full OS? What you asking for doesn't need any support at the kernel level. userfs and CFS already have shown that. The Linux kernel already support a robust and open filesystems interface (which support more different filesystem types than any other -- with read-only support for HPFS, NTFS, BSD and Sun UFS/FFS, and support for HFS (Mac), ext2fs, xiafs, Minix, and many others. If you're a competant programmer (which I am not, BTW) you should be able to trivially take the sources for any of the existing filesystem modules and hack together your own with the encryption support of your choice. How secure the result will be will be a matter of your skills -- and should be greatly improved by peer review (by publishing your work for all to see). Naturally if you are in a free country you can share your work on cryptography with the world. However the USA doesn't appear to currently be free in this particular respect -- please find a congress critter to vote out of office if this oppresses you. -- Jim _________________________________________________________________ An Interesting De-Referencing Problem From: Kevbo simitar@lvnworth.com Here's the brain teaser I read about and promptly forgot the solution (because I thought it would never happen to me). How does one delete a FILE named ".." I have the following at the root directory. * /. a dir (which is normal) * /.. a dir (which is normal) * /.. a file (which is not normal) How this happened I don't know. How to remove this not-bothering-me file has me stumped. Got an answer? I suspect that this file is actually named something like: "/.. " (note the trailing space!). In any event you can remove this with a command like find / -type f -maxdepth 1 -name '..*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -i Note: you must use the GNU versions of find, xargs, and rm to ensure that these features (-print0, -0, and -i) are available. (They may be available in other implmentations -- but you must check first). The find parameters here specify files (not directories, symlinks, device nodes, sockets, or FIFO's) and force it to only search the named directory (or directories if you list more than just /). The -print0 force it to be written as a null-terminated strings (thus the receive process on the other end of the pipe must be able to properly interpret null-terminated arguments -- which is what the -0 to xargs accomplishes). As far as I know there is no way to legally get a NUL character into a Unix filename. (Using a hex editor might get one in there -- but fsck would probably complain on its next pass). The -i on rm is just a little extra protection to prevent any other unexpected side effects. It forces rm to interactively inquire about each argument before removing it. -- Jim _________________________________________________________________ Reminder! From: George Read gread-berkeley@worldnet.att.net I am a subscriber to caldera-users, but as a rank newbie, 99% of what gets posted is irrelevant to my situation and over my head. In fact, I'm looking for some real basic, preliminary information: Perhaps you should consider some avenue of paid support. there are a number of consultants and even a 900 support line. Also, if you have access to IRC there are a few #Linux "channels." (If you've never heard of IRC -- or Internet Relay Chat -- then think of it as an online CB system -- similar to the "chatboards" and "chat lines" on various BBS' and online services (like CompuServe and AOL)). Granted IRC is a bear to figure out -- and 99.9% of what's written there is even less relevant or comprehensible than the traffic on this list. However the feedback is immediate and there are some people who will take time out from their usual chat aggenda to help. There's also that pesky "Answer Guy" from Linux Gazette ;) (but he's too ornery and doesn't help with X Windows stuff at all). 1. A way to create a primary Linux partition on a drive that is entirely occupied by a dos active and a dos extended partition. The extended partition has 400MB available that does not have any data on it, but LISA 2.3 does not wish to give it a primary partition. You have three choices here. You can repartition the drive using traditional methods (backup your data, reformat, re-install DOS and all applications, restore data). You can repartition using FIPS (a non-destructives partitioning program for DOS -- written by Linux or FreeBSD users from what I gather). If you use FIPS the process goes something like: do a backup, verify your backup, unfragment you DOS partitions, run CHKDSK and/or Norton Disk Doctor and/or SCANDISK, then run FIPS. Another approach -- and the only one I know of that doesn't involve repartitioning -- is to use MiniLinux or DOSLinux or XDenu. These distributions (of which DOSLinux is the most recent and must up-to-date) are designed to run on a UMSDOS partition (an MSDOS partition mounted under Linux with support for some Unix semantics). You would be running COL -- but you would be running Linux. You can find information about DOSLinux at Kent Robotti's home page: ftp://wauug.erols.com/pub/people/kent-robotti/doslinux/index.html (Kent is the creator and maintainer of DOSLinux). 2. a workaround to a problem with RAWRITE3: I can't see my COL Base cdrom on a Nakamichi MDR7 jukebox that is controlled by a BusLogic 946C, because Autoprobe can't find anything and I can't get RAWRITE3 to write MODULES.IMG to a floppy on A:. Have you tried supplying the "max_scsi_luns=7" parameter to the kernel during the bootup sequence (at the LILO prompt). Normal SCSI controllers support up to 7 devices. It is possible for these controllers to refer to "Logical Units" on any/all of these devices. These "logical unit numbers" or LUN's aren't very common -- but are used by CD changers (which is why most of them are limited to 6 or 7 CD's) and some tape changes (though those usually use a different mechanism to control tape changes and ejections) and some RAID subsystems and CD-ROM "towers." I have a NEC 7 platter CD changer which requires this parameter. This suggestion assumes that the problem is isolated to the CD drive -- and that your kernel (LISA's) is seeing the BusLogic card. If the problem is that you can't even see the SCSI controller -- then you probably want to look for an alternative boot/root diskette set and boot from that. One of the nice things about user's groups is that you can often have the phone numbers of some local Linux users that will cut you a custom kernel on request and let you pick up the floppy. I'd highly recommend finding (or starting) a local LUG. I've occasionally had people come over to my place where we could plug them onto my ethernet and suck all the free software they want across from one of my systems. (Which reminds me -- I've been meaning to get PLIP working for a couple of years now -- I should really get around to that). For these reasons, I ask: Is there any way to ask caldera-user users for some help on these two questions, sent to my own email address, and not have to read 20 or 30 messages that I can't profit from, at least until I get COL up and running. I had hoped from the name that Post-Only might be such an address, but I see that it is something very different. Caldera has some support options. I think some of them are extra cost items. Have you called them about your Caldera specific questions? At first blush it doesn't look like Caldera's COL is the best Linux distribution for your needs. If you're intent on using COL -- and particularly if you have a business need for Linux -- I'd recommend going out and buying an additional drive. For a couple hundred bucks (US) you can get a 2Gig external SCSI drive (www.corpsys.com if you don't have a suitable vendor handy). Even if you're just experimenting with Linux and don't want to "commit" to it -- an extra external SCSI drive with a couple of Gig of space is a handy investment for just about ANY operating system. It's pretty convenient to connect the extra drive, and just make a copy of everything from your main system. If your time is worth more than $20/hr you can easily make the case for buying a $200 to $300 hard drive. Doing full system and data backups, and verifying them prior to repartitioning can be pretty time consuming. Even if you already have a scheduled backup habit (let's face it -- most don't) and even if you have a regular recovery test plan (which almost nobody bothers with -- often to their detriment!) -- doing a major system change (like repartitioning) almost requires an extra "full" backup and test cycle. (I have customers who've run the cost vs. time numbers for their situations and justified buying a full system and hired me to do the configuration on the same basis. The "extra" system becomes part of the recovery plan for major system disasters). -- Jim _________________________________________________________________ pcmcia ide Drives From: Alan C. Sklar CS266446@wcupa.edu I am trying to install a pcmcia drive through a kit I purchased.. I got the drive all ready I formatted it with a desktop machine and bot my win 95 and linux partitions are defiend... But now when I go and boot linux I send the commad ide2=0x170 and it loads it identifies the right drive but I get all sort of errors... Can you help? C. Alan Sklar I don't have enough information to help with this one. Is this a laptop or a desktop with a PCMCIA adapter installed? In either event what is the make/model of the system? Do you have PCMCIA support installed and built into the kernel? What modules do you have loaded? What does your /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file look like? What type of hard drive is this (make and model)? -- Jim _________________________________________________________________ KDE BETA 1 From: Eric Wood eric@interplas.com This should be the most handy tip known to man! If a certain application (I don't care what it is) complains about missing a library and you know that the library it's wanting is in a certain directory THEN: 1. Add *that* directory to the /etc/ld.so.conf file. 2. Rerun /sbin/ldconfig That's it. What is does is it tells Linux to search the directories specified in /etc/ld.so.conf for library files. Forget about the stupid LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable. Everyone: Please read the ld.so man page for further knowledge. Eric Wood I recently trashed my /etc/ld.so.cache file and had forgotten how to fix it (since the last time I'd had a damaged ld.so.cache was on an old Sun a couple of years ago -- and I've never had one on a Linux box before. Post that to your tech support archives: System hangs on boot -- even with -b and single switches -- or it gives messages like "unable to open ls.so.cache" in a seemingly endless stream: Run /sbin/ldconfig! -- Jim _________________________________________________________________ Compression Program From: Cygnus caldera-users@rim.caldera.com Anyone know of any programs for linux that decompress multi-part (multi-disk) .zip archives? I can't find a one. -Cygnus Most Linux distributions come with the free zip/unzip package. Here's the -L (license) notice from my Red Hat 4.2 "Copyright (C) 1990-1996 Mark Adler, Richard B. Wales, Jean-loup Gailly Onno van der Linden and Kai Uwe Rommel. Type 'zip -L' for the software License. Permission is granted to any individual or institution to use, copy, or redistribute this executable so long as it is not modified and that it is not sold for profit." I think there's a source package for "Info-zip" also floating around. I don't know if this is Info-zip or an independent version -- looking in /usr/doc/unzip*/COPYING I find Mr. Rommel listed -- and that document is definitely about Info-zip. For the future you might try the 'locate' command -- which is fairly common among Linux distributions. The command: locate zip ... will quickly find every file with "zip" in the name or path that was on your system during the last "updatedb" run (which is typically a cron job that's run nightly). -- Jim _________________________________________________________________ loadlin From: Scott Williamsscott@gyst.net Answer guy, To run LOADLIN I need to have a copy of the LINUX kernel on one of my dos partitions, and an initial swap space. No where can I find an actual explaination on how to do this correctly. You don't need an initial swap space to run LOADLIN or to load the kernel. If you have 8Mb or more of RAM you don't "need" to have a swap space at all -- but you'll probably want one. You can swap to a file or a partition -- or even several of each. Assuming that you don't have Linux installed yet you can view man pages for most Linux/GNU commands, functions, packages, and configuration files at: http://www.ssc.com/linux/man.html ... in particular you want to read the mkswap(1) and the swapon(8). The man pages there are accessed via a CGI script so you have to post data to a form to access the individual pages. Thus I can't give URL's directly to the pages in question. That's an unfortunate design decision by the web master at SSC -- it would be more convenient to access (and cause less server load and latency) if they used a cron job to periodically update a tree of static HTML pages and saved the CGI just for searching them. Every time I try to copy the kernel to a dos diskette, Linux overwrites the formatting. DOS then cannot recognize the file from the LOADLIN command. It sounds like you're using 'dd' or RAWRITE.EXE to prepare these diskettes. That's fine for transferring boot/root images -- but has nothing to do with LOADLIN. To use LOADLIN.EXE you copy the kernel image to a plain old DOS file. I haven't even gotten far enough to think about creating an initial swap space... Any advice on the subject? Scott I'd consider getting a copy of DOSLinux from ftp://ftp.waaug.erols.com/pub/people/kent-robotti/doslinux.html (Yes there are still some people out there serving HTML pages via FTP -- nothing in the HTML spec *requires* that HTTP be used as the transport mechanism). Kent Robotti has been working on this distribution for awhile. It takes about 32Mb of space on a DOS partition -- and comes as a set of six 1.44Mb files (so if fits on a half dozen diskettes). You then add a kernel for SCSI or IDE use. Basically DOSLinux works like this. You get all the RAR files (RAR is a Russian Archiving Program like PKZIP, SEA ARC, ARJ, LHARC, ZOO, or whatever). The first image is a self-extracting file (an archive which is linked with a DOS binary of the decompression program -- a common DOS technique among archiving programs). You put these all in a given directory and run the self-extractor (DOSLNX49.EXE as I write this -- it was at "48" a couple weeks ago) from C:\. It thenn extracts all of these images to C:\LINUX directory. This provides a complete (though minimal) Linux distribution. It also shows how to configure a system to use LOADLIN with a UMSDOS root partition. I realize that you may be intending on use something like Red Hat, Slackware, or Debian on a third hard drive, or a removable drive or some other device that LILO just can't see (because you BIOS can't "see" it). You can do that -- and I've done in many times (I first used LOADLIN in about 1994 for exactly that purpose -- with the magneto optical drive I still use). However, if the README's and examples that come out of the LOADLIN package aren't helping you use if for that purpose -- than installing DOSLinux may help get you rolling and serve as a vang DOSLinux may help get you rolling and serve as a valuable example. -- Jim _________________________________________________________________ WipeOut From: Falko Braeutigam falko@softwarebuero.de Hi, in Linux Gazette Issue 22 there was a question about the WipeOut IDE. Your answer was that you never heard about WipeOut :-( Please check ShortBytes of Issue #19 - there is an announcement of WipeOut. WipeOut has nothing to do with xwpe. It _is_ an IDE for C++ and Java. There is just a new release -> http://www.softwarebuero.de/index-eng.html. Regards, Falko This definitely counts as my biggest flub in the 10 months that I've been writing this column. I've gotten about 10 messages correcting me on this point. -- Jim _________________________________________________________________ Copyright © 1997, James T. Dennis Published in Issue 23 of the Linux Gazette December 1997 _________________________________________________________________ [ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Back Next _________________________________________________________________ "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!" _________________________________________________________________ Boulder Linux Users Group -- Best of Luck to Michael Hammel By Wayde Allen _________________________________________________________________ Well since Michael Hammel was our featured speaker for the evening we had our obligatory snow storm (grin). It is amazing that every time he attends one of our meetings this happens. Nevertheless, we still had 24 people in attendance. For those of you who don't know Michael, he writes the Graphic Muse column for Linux Gazette, maintains the Linux Graphics mini-HowTO, helps administer the internet Ray Tracing Competition, coauthored the UNIX Web Server book, designed the magazine cover for the November issue of Linux Journal, and is also the author of a four part article "The Quick Start Guide to the GIMP" now running in Linux Journal. His presentation started out with a demo of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) showcasing many of its features, and perhaps more importantly giving us all an idea of what it could do. The discussion then turned to GUI builders. The group discussed their experiences, likes, dislikes, advantages, disadvantages, and general opinions of many different GUI design software packages. Supporting this discussion, Michael showed us examples of GUI building using XForms (I hope I've got this right) and Visual TCL. After this discussion, Michael showed a 10 minute video tape of Toy Story animated shorts done by Pixar. I think that everyone got a few good laughs from this. We then held a drawing for two CD's from the Internet Ray Tracing competition, and a copy of the November Linux Journal. As usual, we wrapped up the evening with a general discussion of Linux related topics. Since Michael is moving to Dallas next week, I particularly want to thank him for his support of our group!!! I have appreciated him taking the time to talk to us, and have always enjoyed his presentations. I want to wish him the best of luck at his new job. It might be a good idea to warn the North Texas Linux User's Group of an impending change in their weather though (very big grin). Perhaps he can continue to participate in our discussions on the mailing list? _________________________________________________________________ Copyright © 1997, Wayde Allen Published in Issue 23 of Linux Gazette, December 1997 _________________________________________________________________ [ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Back Next _________________________________________________________________ "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!" _________________________________________________________________ CLUELESS at the Prompt: A Column for New Users By Mike List _________________________________________________________________ [INLINE] Welcome to installment 8 of Clueless at the Prompt: a column for new users. _________________________________________________________________ .bashrc and .bash_profile Well, I found out why the bash dotfiles I talked about last month didn't work, and there were a couple things I did wrong. First I didn't recognize the difference between instances of bash and how they differ. * bash as a login shell reads instructions from .bash_profile * bash as used in any other instance is a non-login shell and will either use .bashrc or no .dotfile depending on what -option you assign to it. * presumably the same could go for any preferred shellrc files * the correct way to specify an alias is alias xx=whatever -options. notice that there is no white space between the alias name, the equal sign, and the command that the alias represents Besides aliases you can do also change the color of your console screen with your .bashrc or .bash_profile, by using commands like: "/dev/tty1") setterm -background green -foreground black -store;; By the way I found this out by reading back issues of the Linux Gazette, and you might find some other little gems, just by digging into past issues. _________________________________________________________________ Installing Software One very tricky procedure for new linuxers is installing software. Several months ago I touched on this subject, apparently not in enough depth, so I'm going to give it another go this time with a little more experience under my belt. The best advice I can give you if you are using debian, redhat, or caldera distributions is to look for the software you would like in a compatible package format, ie. RPM for redhat-caldera, and deb for debian. These are most commonly binaries and don't require much to get running.Slackware has packages in tgz format, but this can be misleading, as some source packages are inexplicably given a .tgz extension. If you get your software from the CDROM you should be set, with packages for a given distribution on that CD. Ifg you got your distribution from an ftp site, try using the most appropriate software found on that site, to see if it fits your needs. If not, you should check out the Linux Software Map, to see what kind of alternatives there are for the kind of applications you want. if you have disk space, I recommend that you choose a couple that seem to be close to what you are looking for, install them and use them for a short period to see which is more suitable for your uses. Sad but true, some software compiles easily, but you will probably find that many others take some hacking, and some doesn't seem to compile at all. You are at a distinct advantage if your Linux distribution conforms to the Linux FSSTND, which tends to assure that paths to libraries are the same in your distribution as they were in the distribution that they were written for/in. With enough hacking however, all of the software that has been compiled on one distribution can be compiled on any other. * Use Midnight commander or similar filemanager to look at the contents of the compressed archive for clues. look at files called README, README.elf, INSTALL or other similarly named files for information on how to compile or install them. This isn't always easy as it sounds, but often directions are specific enough to get you on your way. * before unpacking a tarball create a directory to unpack it in and cd to it before using tar -zxvf filename to unpack it, since sometimes the untarring doesn't create a separate directory and if you just unpack it in an existing directory you could get a real ugly situation when you get a bunch of disjointed files cluttering up your directory. you can also use tar -cxvf or similar combination to get a listing of the files that would be unleashed when you use the -z option. This will tell you if the files have a designated pathname which means that it will create its own directories and subdirectories that will keep the parent directory nice and tidy. * It's a very good idea to print out the README, INSTALL or similar files before you start to compile the software, so you can refer to the documentation as you go. If you don't have lpr configured properly yet, you can use cat README |pr -l 56 >/dev/lp0 (or lp1, or whatever). Using the -l 56 option should paginate the file so that page breaks occur where they should. * When you read the documentation, keep an eye out for any indication that you need, say Motif or Xforms or other libraries or toolkits that you don't have installed,if you don't have them you won't have a compiled application either. * Alternatively to printing the documentation out to paper, if you have X installed use separate xterms to view the docs and configure, and make the application. * Remember, most Linux archive maintainers keep a close eye on their sites so it's safe to download and install a binary if it's available. _________________________________________________________________ I'm not really a Linux guru, and I'm starting to get into more advanced (??) stuff, and my intent was and still is to present information that a new user can implement now and research at his/her convenience, I'm not trying to be the Weekend Mechanic OR the Answer Guy, although I aspire to their level of Linux prowess. Briefly put, although it's a little late to be brief, I may not be appearing monthly after this issue, since I don't want to write just to hear myself type, I'll likely post a column when I can nail down a column's worth of information. _________________________________________________________________ I still invite questions, suggestions, reasonable criticism and just plain e-mail: troll@net-link.net Don't M$ out, try Linux!! _________________________________________________________________ Copyright © 1997, Mike List Published in Issue 23 of Linux Gazette, December 1997 _________________________________________________________________ [ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Back Next _________________________________________________________________ "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!" _________________________________________________________________ COMDEX/Fall '97 By Carlie Fairchild _________________________________________________________________ Las Vegas, Nevada is host each year to one of the largest technology trade shows in the U.S.--COMDEX/Fall. This year nearly 220,000 industry professionals lined up to find, test and research the latest technologies from the leading industry vendors. Earlier in the year the staff of Linux Journal volunteered to coordinate the COMDEX/Fall Linux Pavilion. Coordinating the event turned out to mean hours of preparation, and, luckily, vendors were quick to lend a hand. Kit Cosper of Linux Hardware Solutions managed to talk the spirit of Linux into Softbank, the sponsor of the COMDEX show. As a result, COMDEX personnel were very cooperative and worked with us to ensure that the floor space for the pavilion was in the best possible site; that is, we weren't hidden away in a back corner. Attendees seemed pleased to find many of their favorite Linux vendors in one convenient and easy-to-find area. Vendors present included Caldera, Linux Hardware Solutions, Enhanced Software Technologies, S.u.S.E., Red Hat Software, Hard Data, Quant-X, Infomagic, LinuxMall, Linux International and, of course, Linux Journal. Jon "maddog" Hall barely held his own against the hordes of Linux enthusiasts visiting the Linux International booth. Several members of the Linux community kindly volunteered their time to staff the Linux International booth, answering questions and spreading the word about Linux. Volunteers included Marc Merlin, Ira Abramov, Dan Peri and Richard Demanowski. Red Hat Software announced the December 1 release of Red Hat Linux 5.0. To mark the event, Red Hat balloons filled the Linux Pavilion area of the convention center. The Linux mascot, Tux the penguin, was carried away in all of the excitement (see photo). S.u.S.E., a popular European Linux vendor, also announced the latest release of their Linux distribution, S.u.S.E. 5.1. This was S.u.S.E.'s first appearance at COMDEX, and considering their rapid growth in the U.S. market, it will most likely not be their last. Their distribution demonstrations proved to be great crowd pleasers, compliments of Bodo, Rolf, Michael and James Gray, the President of S.u.S.E. U.S. (See review of S.u.S.E. in this issue.) Clarica Grove, Britta Kuybus and I staffed the Linux Journal booth. We were quite pleased with the turnout of this year's show. During last year's COMDEX, we were kept busy explaining what Linux is to all comers. We were pleased to find that this year's COMDEX attendees had remembered and done their homework from last year. Not only did most people we spoke with know about Linux, but many of them are using it and very excited with their results. It goes to show that the popularity of Linux is indeed growing. Linux is being looked at more than ever as a cost-effective, viable operating system. Thanks to years of dedicated work by all of the Linux vendors, Linux International and the Linux community, we are now able to begin enjoying the success of Linux. This year's COMDEX Linux Pavilion was a showcase of this success. Linux Journal would like to thank everyone involved with this year's show--look forward to seeing you there next year. _________________________________________________________________ Copyright © 1997, Carlie Fairchild Published in Issue 23 of the Linux Gazette, December 1997 _________________________________________________________________ [ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Back Next _________________________________________________________________ "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!" _________________________________________________________________ Configuring procmail with The Dotfile Generator By Jesper Pedersen _________________________________________________________________ [LINK] In this article, I'll describe how to configure procmail using The Dotfile Generator (TDG for short). This will include: * How to sort mails coming from different mailing list * How to setup an auto reply filter, when you are on vacation * How to change some part of a letter, i.e. remove the signature * How to avoid that mail get lost! It might be a good idea to download the program. To do that, please go to the home page of TDG, to find the nearest mirror. You might also be interesting in reading the article I've written about TDG for Linux Journal. _________________________________________________________________ Starting TDG To start TDG with the procmail module, type dotfile procmail. Now a window should appear like in figure 1. As you can see, the module is split up in three pages, the first two are very simple, so lets start with the page called General Setup. This page can be seen in figure 2. [INLINE] Figure 1 [INLINE] Figure 2 On this page there are four things, to configure: 1. The directory to use as prefix for all file operations. This is just for ease, since all file operations may be with full prefix. 2. Your email address, will be used in preventing loop-backs. 3. Configuration of log files. These are very useful, when you wish to investigate where the different mail went. If you turn on abstract logging, you may find the program mailstat very useful. (See The log file below) 4. The search path, in which procmail may find the programs which it needs. Note this is only the programs, that you specify in filters etc. _________________________________________________________________ Avoiding lost mail Since procmail handles your incoming mail, the security is very important to this module. This means that you may backup your incoming mail in three different ways. To do this, go to the page called Backup. Part of it can be seen in figure 3. [INLINE] figure 3 The first category of backup is to back up all incoming mail. The code, which must be generated to the procmailrc file for this, will be written as the very first line. This is to avoid that any errors in the generated procmail file will throw away any of your mails. This sort of backup is only a good idea when you at first start using the generated procmail file. The main drawback is that all incoming mail is saved in one file, and this file may become huge very fast. The second method is to backup all incoming mail, which are delivered by procmail. This may be a good idea to use, to verify that mail are sorted into the right places. The third method is to backup all mail, which makes it to your incoming mailbox. This mail are often mails, which do not come from a mailing list, and which are not junk mail to thrown away. In the first method, you have to specify the full filename. This is because this method has to be 100% full prof. In the next two methods you may build the file names from the current date and time. This makes it possible to save this sort of mail to folders, for the current year/month/week etc. E.g. a folder called backup-delivered-1997-July As an additional feature, you may keep the files as gziped files. The backup of delivered mail may be specified for each individual recipe, or for all recipes at once. (see figure 4 check box 9) To learn how to use the FillOut elements, which configures the file to save to, please see the Dotfile Generator article in Linux Journal. _________________________________________________________________ Setting up the recipes In procmail a central concept is a recipe. A recipe is a set of conditions, and a set of actions. All the actions are executed, if all of the conditions is fulfilled. Below is a few examples of conditions: * The letter comes from president@white.house.com * The subject is subscribe * The size of the letter is greater than 1Mb * The letter contain the text ... A list of actions may include: * Reply to the sender, that you are on holiday * forward the letter to another person * save the letter to a file * change some part of the letter (i.e. add a new header field, add some text to it etc.) A procmail configuration is a sequence of recipes. When a letter arrive, each recipe is checked to see if all its conditions are fulfilled. If they are, the actions of the recipe is executed. Procmail will finish testing recipes when one is matched, unless a flag is set to tell it, that this recipe should not stop the deliverment (see figure 4 check box 8). This means that the order of the recipes are important, since only the first recipe, which match will process the letter. If none of the recipes are fulfilled, or if the ones which are fulfills have check box 8 in figure 4 set, the letter is delivered to the incoming mailbox as if the procmail filter haven't been there at all. You configure the recipes on the page called ``Recipes''. This page can be seen in figure 4. [INLINE] figure 4 What you see here is an ExtEntry. An ExtEntry is a widget, which repeats it elements as many times as necessary (just like a list box repeats the labels.) All what you see on this page, is one single recipe. To see a new recipe, you have to scroll the outer scroll bar (1). To add a new recipe, you have to press the button below the scroll bar. As described above, a recipe is a set of conditions. This set is also represented with an ExtEntry (2). To scroll to another condition in a recipe, you have to use scroll bar (2), and to add a new condition, you have to use the button below scroll bar (2). You may give each recipe a unique name, which will make it easier to find a given recipe. This name will also be written to the file with mail delivered by recipes (method 2 above), so you can see which recipe matched the actual letter. To give a recipe a name, use entry (3). At the right side of the entry, a button labeled Idx is located. This is a quick index to the outer ExtEntry (i.e. the recipes). If you press this button a list box will drop down, where you may select one of the recipes to scroll to, by its name. The conditions of a recipe The most common condition one wishes to set up, is that one of the header fields matches a given regular expression, or that the body of the letter matches a given regular expression. To explain how to do that, lets first see what a header may look like. From procmail-request@Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE Tue Jan 28 16:30:46 1997 Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 10:06:28 -0500 (EST) From: Rick Troxel Subject: Re: Lynx as an external viewer for pine In-reply-to: To: procmail mailing list Cc: "Robin S. Socha" The very first line of the letter is special. This line has been written by the program sending the letter (often called sendmail). This header field is often always the same for a given mailing list, so to sort mail from a mailing list, it might be a good idea to read the letter with an ordinary file reader (NOT a mail reader, as it will seldom show this line). And copy this information to the pattern field (figure 4, label (6) ). As the element to match, you have to select Sendmail from in entry (5). Three special macros exists in procmail. These may be used, when matching header fields: TO This macro matches every destination specifications. FROM_DAEMON This should match when the letter comes from a daemon (which includes mailing lists). This is useful, to avoid creating a mail loop with some mailing list. FROM_MAILER An other regular expression, which matches that the letter comes from mail daemon. To see what these macros stand for, please refer to the manual page called procmailrc. There is a lot of header fields to chose between in the pull down menu (5), but if the one you wish to select isn't located there, you may type it yourself. The check box (4) may be used to negate the condition, i.e. the pattern shall not match to fulfill the condition. Regular expressions So far, I have mentioned that you may type a regular expression in (6). In most cases, it may not be necessary to know anything about regular expressions, since the procmail module will take care of most of it for you. One thing may be worth to know anyway, and that is that you may match ``anything'' with .* This means that abc.*def will match anything which start with abc and ends with def, eg. abcdef or abcXXXXdef. To see a more detailed description of the set of regular expression, that procmail uses, you may press the button labeled Description One common pitfall is to forget to match everything at the start of the line. I.E. If you wish to set up a regular expression for the From: field above, it is not enough to give the pattern: rick@helix.nih.gov, since this is not at the start of the line, you have to tell procmail that every mail messages, which includes the text rick@helix.nih.gov is to be handled, I.E. insert .* in front of the email address. Letting an external program decide whether a condition is fulfilled A final way to set up a condition is by using an external program to verify some conditions. This is done by pressing button (7). This will bring up a window with a FillOut like the one you can see in figure 3. This time, however, the entry has been replaced with a text box. In this text box you may type some commands, which reads either the header or the body on standard input. These command may refer to some header fields from the letter. The line (separated with a newline) will be joined together with a separating semicolon. This makes each line a separate command. Procmail will consider the condition fulfilled if the exit code from the program is 0 and not otherwise. This behavior may be changed with the check button (4) in figure 4. _________________________________________________________________ Actions The actions, that this module can handle is split up in six parts. These are described in detail below. To activate an action, you first have to select the check box, which is located next to it. This is, to make it clear which actions are enabled for a given recipe. Predesigned filters In the window which appear, when you press the button labeled Predesigned Filters, you may set up a filter. This filter may change the header fields, add new header fields and/or remove existing header fields. On this page you will find one custom-made filter: Remove signatures. With this filter, you may specify a signature for each email address. If the text you specify is found (exactly!) it will be removed from the letter. My intention is that more custom-made filters will be added, as users send me their ideas and filters. Handmade filters If you wish to create your own filter, you have to go the page Handmade filters. On this page, you may send the header and/or the body of a letter through a command. As an example, you may remove the header with the command cat - >> /dev/null, or add a message to the body of a message with the command echo This letter has been resent to you, by my procmail filter!; cat - If only the filter actions is selected, the filter will change the letter permanently, i.e. the changes will have effect on the subsequent recipes (even on the delivered letter, if no recipe match!) This may be useful if you e.g. uses a mail reader, which does not support mime, and you have a filter, which can convert mime encoded text to 7 bit ascii. If however one of the other actions are enabled, the changes will only have effect within this recipe! The reply action With the reply action, you may set up a reply mechanism, which sends a letter back to the sender, with a message you specify. One feature of this mechanism is that you may specify how often a reply should be send, you have the following possibilities. * Send a reply to each letter * Send a reply only once * Send only a reply if it is more than a given number of days since the last reply was send. This is useful, if you leave on vacation, and wish to send a message that you will not read your letter at once. The reply is only sent, if the letter does not come from a daemon, to avoid that you sent a reply to every message on a mailing list. The forward action With the forward action, you may forward letters to other email accounts. The save to file action With this action, you may save the letter to a file. The file name is specified with a FillOut widget, just like you specified the name of a file to save backups to. This time, however, you have two additional features: you may use the content of a header field, or you may use the output from a command. In figure 5, you can see how to select a header field to extract as part of the file name. [INLINE] figure 5 Email addresses may be given in three ways: * real name * email (real name) * email If you select that the field is an email address, you may specify that you wish to extract the user name with or without the domain part. Finally, you may pipe the header field though a command you specify yourself. This command may read the value of the header field on standard input, and write to standard output. The pipe action With the pipe action, you may specify a command,