May 2004 – doncho.net

Month: May 2004

“Вдругиден” ставаше!

Posted on 5/31/2004 by Doncho

“Вдругиден”, или още казано “Денят след утре”, или още по-друго казано “След утрешният ден”, или както американците са си го кръстили “The Day After Tomorrow” ставаше за гледане!
Не очаквах кой-знае какво – и съответно и не получих кой-знае какво. Ефектите са на повече от задоволително ниво.
Поредният филм, в който американците (е, целият свят, но логично действието беше фокусирано в/у Северна Америка) преживяват (далеч не всички обаче) поредният апокалипсис.
Честно казано, на моменти тръпки ме побиваха. Не толкова от самият филм, колкото от реалистичността на изказаните факти и предположения. От това, което съм чел и гледал мисля, че описаното там може да се случи! Може би не точно толкова бързо, и не точно в тези размери, но… абе страшничко. И още по-страшничкото е, че нищо не можем да направим, за да го предотвратим – Земята ще става все по-пренаселена и все по-мръсна :). И ще видим…
Ако ви е харесал “The Independance Day” – ще ви хареса и този. На мен лично този повече ми хареса, защото е по-близко до реалността.

LUG дни в Стара Загора

Posted on 5/30/2004 by Doncho

Преди два часа се върнах от lug-bg дните в Стара Загора.
Два интересни дни, изпълнени с емоции, срещи и ценни знания и опит. Запознах се с хора, с които засега само се бяхме ругали в lug-bg :). Купих си lug-bg фланелки. Въобще – много ценен опит!
Използвах събота вечер, за да се видя с братовчед си – арх. Банко Банов. Знам, че звучи много официално за първи братовчед, но макар и винаги близки (когато бяхме много по-млади), ние сме живели и живеем като че ли не само в два различни града, но и в два различни свята. Останах много приятно изненадан, че открихме цяла купчина общи проблеми, и нито веднъж разговорът не тръгна “в небитието”. Преди не беше така, но и ние сме нямали възможност да си говорим сериозно поне от 10 години насам. А за 10 години много неща се променят. Като цяло – никак не съжалявам, че изпуснах купонът на lug-bg (за него днес се говори много, и имайки впредвид какво чух – дълго време ще се говори за него – lug-bg в Стара Загора).
Сега си почивам, свалям новите headers от Dag, и чакам да видя с какво ще ме изненада за update. Веси все повече свиква с Fedora (не че съм очаквал нещо друго – тя, колкото и да виеше против Линукс за домашна OS, все пак обича хубавите неща). Ангел може да се каже, че е с нормален стомах и корем… абе има светлина в тунела, както е модерно да се казва. Тези дни Ангел е ял като за 4-ма човека от неговият калибър – явно има много за наваксване (то и си личи). Тази вечер ще го оставим на вещата грижа на баба му, а ние ще посетим The Day After Tomorrow. Веси вече е скептична (“Аз не си падам много по такива апокалиптични филми”), но аз пък харесвам такива филми, и мисля че ще си струва гледането на кино.
Утре продължавам работата по новият проект. Тази командировка от 4 седмици в Женева направо ще ми изпие мозъка – дано Шефът да успее да договори по-малко дни там, че 28 дни сам в средата на лятото ми се виждат една непоносима командировка! Ще видим… най-важното все пак си остава работата.

Отново на български

Posted on 5/25/2004 by Doncho

Отдавна не бях писал на български в моят блог. Все така се случваше, че или покрай неприятности вкъщи, или покрай решаване на технически Федорини проблеми, забивах по някой технически материал и оставях ежедневието (дневничното) настрани. Не ми се пишеше.
Днес реших да се опитам да се променя. Започнах с преместване (като копия, всъщност) на всички технически материали на моят сайт в специална страница (по-прегледно, по-удобно, много по-***, но ме мързеше до сега).
Засега съм решил новите неща в този блог да бъдат повече посветени на ежедневните проблеми, и повече на български език. Техническите ще ги пиша на сайта ми – който иска – да гледа там. Може би ще слагам референция само тук (като едноредов постинг в блога), но няма да ви отегчавам с technical crap повече.
Ангел все още боледува… Не точно боледува, но е на диета. Това стомашно разстройство се оказа много сериозен проблем за мъничето – за 2 седмици свали поне 2 килограма, което съотнесено към общото му тегло е около 15% – представете си за 2 седмици един 80 кг човек да загуби 12 кг – страшно! Но детенцето се държи, много му е криво, че яде безвкусни диетични храни, иска какво ли не непрекъснато – не знам на кой ще му е по-трудно – на баба му или на него тези дни.
Веси след 5 дни болнични за последните 10 дни не може да взема дни, освен ако не е супер спешно (дано да няма нужда).
Тези дни успяхме да преборим разстройството и температурата – сега надеждата е, че постепенно ще вървим към оправяне. Само ние си знаем (и основно – майка му) какво ни беше… сигурно всички родители така преживяват първото по-сериозно боледуване на детето им.
Да си пожелаем скоро да не се налага писане на подобни постинги!

“only root is allowed to mount…”

Posted on 5/24/2004 by Doncho

(this article has moved here)
Today I passed the next Fedora problem. It was trivial, but I post it here for my (and others’) reference. The problem was – no one except ‘root’ was able to mount /mnt/fd0 or /mnt/cdrom. Trivial, but nasty.
The solution was simple – I added ‘user’ option to the mount options in /etc/fstab (right before “kudzu”).

Fedora Core 2 and Synaptics Touchpad: another battle won

Posted on 5/22/2004 by Doncho

(this article has moved here)
The next problem after upgrading my Fedora to Core 2 came from the fact that my Synaptics Touchpad (Acer Travelmate 202TE notebook) refused to accept any touch-events. I had faced this problem before, when I was trying kernel 2.6.x, but because I decided not to use that kernel until it becomes official to Fedora Core 2, I did not considered that as a problem then.
But now – it was really annoying. Touchpad was working (cursor was moving fine), but touch-events (tap = click for example) were not working fine. I had to look for a solution!
The Google query returned me plenty of results. At least I could see that someone else had also troubles with 2.6.x kernels and that touchpad. The advice (to this Mandrake user) was to download and install the original driver. Another advice (search for Synaptics there – this is a long FAQ) told to add “psmouse.proto=imps” to my kernel startup command line in order to restore 2.4 behavior. I hate this solution, so I had to go for the driver.

I downloaded the driver, and built it. I copied resulting synaptics_drv.o to the right place (as INSTALL said, it was /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input/ – no matter that FC2 uses XOrg instead of XFree).
Now it was time to /etc/X11/XF86Config modifications. I added
```
Load "synaptics"
```
to my “Module” section.
I added the whole group of settings for my new input device. I decided to rename the device to Synaptics0 instead of “Synaptics Mouse” as INSTALL suggests.
I added the new Pointer devices. I changed the “CorePointer” of existing “Mouse0” to “AlwaysCore”, because I was planning to use from time to time also PS/2 mouse. Now my XF86Config lines look like:
```
InputDevice    "Mouse0" "AlwaysCore" # "CorePointer"
InputDevice    "Synaptics0"  "AlwaysCore" # "CorePointer"
```
It seems the default Fedora Core 2 kernel comes precompiled with all needed options for the driver, so no kernel compilation was additionally necessary. Both CONFIG_MOUSE_PS2 and CONFIG_INPUT_EVDEV are set to “y” in /boot/config-2.6.5-1.358 file
Restart of the X and – OMG – it was working again. I connected also PS/2 mouse to check (after restart) if it will work too – and I was charmed! All seems fine for now – I also plan to use this gui configuration program for the touchpad, but this will be a bit later.

Fedora Core 2: Fix for Missing keyboard layouts problem

Posted on 5/22/2004 by Doncho

(this article has moved here)
After the upgrade of my Fedora from Core 1 to Core 2, I noticed very serious problem – my keyboard layouts were missing, no switching – nothing! In KDE Control Panel -> Regional & Accessibility -> Keyboard Layout, the Available Layouts list was empty, also XKB options list was empty too.
I was astonished! After a long Google struggle, I found the solution here. It seems that the XFree86 to XOrg migration, which occurs in Core 2, has caused this problem. Seems also that Control Center expects to find the available layouts in the xfree86.lst file, while the new xorg layouts are placed in xorg.lst.
Execution of these commands as root fixed my problem:

cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/rules
ln -s xorg.lst xfree86.lst
ln -s xorg.xml xfree86.xml

Thanks to Ralf Ertzinger for his post – it saved my day!

PCMCIA Fedora Core 2 problem fixed!

Posted on 5/21/20049/5/2004 by Doncho

(this article has moved here)

Yesterday I upgraded the Fedora on the notebook (Acer TM 202). The new linux kernel was 2.6.6. Surpsingly, after the reboot PCMCIA networking stopped. There was an error about eth0 not being present (because PCMCIA was loaded after the networking), and that’s it – it was not getting online after loadig of the PCMCIA.

Before (in Core 1) the behavior was the same, but after PCMCIA loading it was somehow working – it seems it was detecting/raising the eth0! Now it was refusing to do so. And I had to look for another solution.

I checked the Google – nothing special :(. Similar problems, lots of results (more than 5000), but no straight solution for my problem (logically: Fedora Core 2 was only 5 days old).

I started to solve the problem manually, and after:

rmmod 3c509_cs
rmmod ds
/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart

it went fine! HELL! It seemed that the eth0 failure (when PCMCIA driver was not yet present) was locking something, which ruined the success of any future network driver loading.

I decided to ask LUG-Bulgaria. After one hour maximum I received a valuable answer from Peter Georgiev, who told me to switch the PCMCIA loading priority from 24 (current) to 9 (higher than the networking). His precise instructions were:

Open /etc/init.d/pcmcia
Change the line
```
# chkconfig: 2345 24 96
```
to
```
# chkconfig: 2345 09 96
```
Yes, it’s in a comment, but it seems it has meaning to the chkconfig command (see below).
Execute
```
chkconfig --level 2345 pcmcia reset
```

After these changes, PCMCIA executes before my network, and all works.

I am still wondering if that solution is correct. Maybe we just killed the resulting symptom, not the real problem, but it works for now. I do not hear the standart “beep beep” when my PCMCIA gets up, and I do not hear it when I remove/insert a card. But I can live with that.

Please, if someone reads this, and if this someone has another explanation of my problem – I will be really curious to hear it. It seems that the problem is somewhere in the newer kernel modules, but… I am yet too lame to find and resolve it. I miss the old way, but the newer kernel is more important than it.

Nice Fedora FAQ

Posted on 5/20/2004 by Doncho

While looking about article how to fix my yum.conf in order to update to base only, I just found a nice Unofiicial Fedora 2 FAQ page. There I found good explanation about how to install Java JRE – a thing which I needed before some time (and fixed locally). Now I have working JRE for all the users :).
I continue with my “yum update” saga – we’ll see…
Ah, also I found another Fedora News site… I think more dynamic than the original FedoraNEWS.org.

Which file to which RPM belongs…

Posted on 5/20/2004 by Doncho

Today Alexander Shopov was giving me some help because of a very severe problem I had here. The problem (already solved by magic – we did not noticed what exactly solved it) was that

rpm -qi kernel

was showing two kernel packages installed, but when I try to remove the older one, it was reporting that the package was not (?) installed. However, as I said – the problem was solved magically – after many tries, the last “rpm -e” command strangeously why succeeded.
However, this article is not about this. It’s about some nice rpm query commands that I want to remember. And the best way to remember them is to store them here :).
The first command to remember is:

rpm -qi <package name>

This command gives you valuable information about all installed package’s versions. If this this information is too much for you, and if you need the real package(s) names, in the way they should be given in probable “rpm -e” command, then you should use the second command to remember:

rpm -qa <package name>

This command enlists all packages with thie name (and their different versions). You may use the output as source of the “rpm -e” command later.
And during Alexander’s help, I learned the third command (mini-script) to remember:

for i in*; do echo -n "$i :: " && rpm -qf $i; done

If you run this mini script in given directory, it will list each file from that directory and the rpm, to which this file eventually belongs to. If the file does not belong to any rpm – you will have the corresponding message about it. Very useful thing indeed!
I would like to thank again to Alexander for all his time! I learned valuable things, and he also helped me (though I did not understood how finally it worked) to overcome my problem!

Running scheduled tasks

Posted on 5/19/2004 by Doncho

This article should continue my Linux lame articles, which I post here. I am starting to think to rename the “Hacking” category to “Lamer” :). Maybe later…

Today I had another Linux-newbie problem to solve. It’s simple, it’s newbie, and although I’m Linux user since 1994, I never had need to sove similar problems, or I never wrote my experience about such. So now I decided to write it here, and when I need it again after 5 years, I will just consult my blog ;).

The problem: I had to force SIM to erase some history files regularly. Usually, people just redirect the needed history file(s) to /dev/null, but strangeously why, my SIM-ICQ 0.9.3 was not able to accept such solution (**really** weird things started to happen with all accounts, which had their history files as links to /dev/null, so I quit trying that solution).
I had to create a script, and make it run each day on the morning. I wanted even more – I wanted cron to force all scripts, placed in given directory, to run at given time.
The really **big problem** was the fact that I was lazy to read! I wanted to solution right now in my hands, so I had to ask Veselin Kolev, one of the Linux gurus, for help. I know it’s a shame to waste experienced people time like that, but again, I was lazy to read, and Veso was online :).
He told me in few lines the solution. And here it is:

First, I had to create the folder in my home directory. I chosed the name “.cron”, because it was looking nice to me, and it’s a hidden folder – it would not bother me when browsing my home with Konqueror;
Now it was turn to make the script. So I did, I placed the script in that folder.
Now it was time for root access. I modified /etc/crontab – I added the following line to it:
```
# `doncho` scripts
00 6 * * * doncho run-parts /home/doncho/.cron >> /dev/null 2>&1
```
Now, all the scripts from directory “/home/doncho/.cron” will run each day at 6:00 AM.

During our conversation, Veso explained me how to use the “at” command for tasks, which I need to run once at given scheduled time. His brief explanations were:

You create a script, and place it somewhere. Example – the following script (named ~/download), which downloads some site at some dir:
```
#!/bin/bash
wget --directory-prefix=/home/doncho/dobwload http://nana_download_server
```
Now we must schedule the execution using the “at” command:
```
at -f ~/download 23:00 05182004
```
This script will run on May 18th 2004 at 23:00
If the computer was switched off at that time, the script will run as soon as the computer gets up later, i.e. it would not be forgotten if the computer was offline when that time comes.

That’s all for today :). I hope you did not get too bored :).