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While installing GNU/Linux (SuSE 7.3, 8.2 and 9.0, KUbuntu Hoary and Breezy by now) on my system, I wrote down some things I considered interesting and/or noteworthy. Perhaps they also are of help to you. Note that this is far from being (or wanting to be) a comprehensive list (rather a list of notes for myself...) and probably many of my problems just origined from missunderstandings on my side! No guarantees whatsoever! :-)
Additionally to my "personal directories" I used a directory structure similar to that proposed by the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard in my home directory. That is I have ~/etc, ~/var, ~/bin, etc. in my home directory and I store the appropriate files for "personally" (i.e. not system wide) installed programs in the appropriate places there (that is logfiles to ~/var/log, config files to ~/etc and so on).
See www.distributed.net for more info.
/home/thorsten/bin/dnetc -ini
/home/thorsten/etc/dnetc.ini in my Gome session startup
list.exec killall dnetc which so kills the client at
logout.Galeon is the Gnome webbrowser.
When Galeon (1.0.5 is what this was "tested" with) crashes, it seems to lose or break some of its settings; at least using proxies did not work any more afterwards. Removing the ~/.galeon directory and building the settings anew seemed to solve the problem.
2003-05-18: If you want to exclude certain domains from using a proxy you may not only give the full name or ip address but can also use stuff like ".com" or ".something.com" to exclude all subdomains matching this pattern. Note though that this only seems to work if you give all of those "patterns" before any full names or ip addresses in the appropriate text field!
2004-01-07: I've switched from GNOME to KDE; I was pretty happy with Gnome 1.4 but in Gnome 2.2 (included in SuSE 9.0) a large number of useful features (which were present in the earlier release) are missing and you are forced to use Metacity as a windowmanager which is definitly not an option for me as it also lacks many important features. Still I wanted to use Galeon as my webbrowser as I haven't found another browser as good as it. I was pretty dissapointed that also Galeon seems to have adopted the overal "You don't need to be able to change this!" policy of Gnome until I found out that fortunatly you can still change/set most of the stuff by the "low-level approach" of using gconf-editor to edit the gconf database directly.
MySQL is a free database system.
2004-01-07: The /etc/init.d/mysql script for starting/stopping the MySQL system under SuSE always told me that the starting of the database "failed" though it ran fine when I checked the status. Reason for this is, that the script uses mysqladmin -ping to check if the system is running and needs to be able to login to MySQL with username "root" and no password from the localhost. As I also set a password for this account for security reasons, I always got the "failed" message, because the connection from the script failed.
OpenSSH is a free implementation of SSH (Secure Shell, a secure telnet/rlogin/etc. replacement)
/usr/lib/libcrypto.so.2 I just made a link to the existing
/usr/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.6 and it worked fine.See www.php.net for more info.
After long and fruitless tries, I finally managed to make the two work together. Strangly it worked when I did exactly what was proposed in the PHP/PDFLib readmes, also I am sure that this did not work when I tried it earlier?!?
Update for PHP 4.1.2: Of course this didn't work for 4.1.2 :-((( I got some compiling errors in pdf.c ("initializer element is not computable at load time"). So here is what I did - probably superyukki but it worked for me: Do everything as above but when copying the files from /pdflib-4.0.1/bind/php/etc/pdf to /php-4.1.2/ext/pdf do not copy pdf.c, php_pdf.h and libs.mk but keep the original files from the PHP distribution. This way I was able to compile PHP with PDFLib support (which never worked otherwise) but avoided the compiling error ...
Update for PHP 4.2.3: This version compiled without problems with the above steps; I even was able to ommit the "(copy files ..." step for pdflib as the appropriate files already seem to be included in the PHP 4.2.3 source distribution.
MySQL function were not found. I had to change some stuff in /etc/php4/apache2/php.ini:
First: Setting the correct path for the extensions (in line 429 or so) from ...
; Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside. ;extension_dir = "./"... to ...
; Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside. extension_dir = "/usr/lib/php4/20050606"(for Breezy; for Hoary it was something like 20020429 if I remember right).
Second: Activating the mysql.so extension by adding ...
extension=mysql.so... to the end of the file and then restarting the Apache server (sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart).
qmail is a free MTA (Mail transfer agent) like sendmail or Postfix. vpopmail is an add-on to make working with virtual domains easier.
2004-01-07: Though the README.vqmaillocal file in the vpopmail distribution says to replace the original /var/qmail/bin/qmail-local with the vqmaillocal executable from vpopmail, DO NOT DO THIS!! vqmaillocal does not handle .qmail-files and maybe some other things and you'll end up with endless mail loops for mails send to non-existent users and similar. Just use the original qmail-local, everything works fine with it. Maybe the README.vqmaillocal is outdated by now and was only valid for earlier distributions.
scache is a free www caching and filtering software written in Java.
The author of scache announced a bug in his software, has canceled further developement and now advises everybody not to use the program any more. Though I must admit that I neither can see the seriousness of the problem nor the reason why it should be so hard to fix you might want to honour his wish and switch to some other cache software.
#!/bin/sh
case $1 in
start)
echo "Starting scache"
/usr/lib/java/bin/java -classpath /opt/scache:/usr/lib/java/lib/classes.zip scache -cfgdir $HOME/etc/scache >$HOME/var/log/scache 2>$HOME/var/log/scache.err
;;
*)
echo "Sorry, nothing besides 'start' is currently implementet."
;;
esac
(Yes, this is far from finished ;-) and put it in /usr/local/bin.Snort is an intrusion detection system that analyzes network traffic for wellknown attack patterns.
Snort needs the libpcap library; unfortunatly all Snort-RPMs I found seemed to require the shared version libpcap.so.0.6.2 which in turn was not included in any of the libpcap-RPMs I found (You probably have to create it yourself from the libpcap sources). When I compiled Snort from the sources the static library seems to get used by default and Snort workes fine.
A small Gnome applet that lets you start and stop dialup connections and shows transfer rates and connection time (yes, the name is a bit misleading :-).
When I accidently set my umask to 077 (only I have rights on the files I create, neither group nor anyone else is allowed to do something, not even read) the applet wouldn't show any more info or let me terminate a running connection. This is just because the applet wasn't able to read the lock file any more. When I changed the umask to 037 so group could read to, everything worked fine again.
Sylpheed-claws is the "bleeding edge" branch of Sylpheed, a fast and lightweight GTK mailer.
.configure'ing (pixbuf will deactivate
imlib).--disable-nls when .configure'ing.2004-01-07: After my 9.0 installation, sending of to be signed or to be encrypted mails suddenly failed with a "could not queue message for sending". Without signing or encryption everything works fine. After looking at the sourcecode I found out, that sylpheed-claws checks the GPG_AGENT environment variable and if it is set, it assumes there is a GPG_AGENT running and sylpheed-claws will not ask for the passphrase itself which will cause the signing/encryption to fail (because it can't provide a passphrase for unlocking the private key needed for this) and the message will not be queued. If you're not using the agent (like me) just unset this variable and everything should work fine again.
2004-03-24: Another reason for the above message could be (though I did not experience that myself) that simply your ~/Mail/queue directory is either missing or has the wrong permissions set so sylpheed can't write to it.
Sylpheed-claws on Breezy seems to be configured to use the gpg-agent (which is automatically started, haven't actually found out where). Unfortunatly the gpg-agent does not seem to be properly configured for requesting the passphrase when it is needed, so when sending mails that had to be signed Sylpheed-claws just stood there and apparently did nothing.
So here's what I did (with thanks to Google and the Gentoo documentation which was the only place I actually found information about that!):
Create (if it does not already exist a file $HOME/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf. Enter the following:
pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-qt default-cache-ttl 1800
You probably will have to install the pinentry-qt package first too. There are other versions of this package which do not use the QT toolkit, but since KDE uses QT too I decided to use that one.
I can't remember if I had to restart anything or if I rebooted (probably not necessary - after all we're using GNU/Linux! :-) but with that it works fine, now I'm getting asked properly for the passphrase and can send my mails out again.
I was rather annoyed when I found out that with Breezy (never experienced it on Hoary) every CD that I inserted would be automatically mounted and opened in a new Konqueror window thus interrupting my work. Some people may like that but I personally think that you shouldn't just copy every stupid idea that exists on Windows ... (Yes, I know, I'm a little picky with some things. This behaviour may actually have some uses but I simply like the system to do just the things I tell it to ... ;-)
So here is how to disable that feature:
First: In /etc/hal/hald.conf I changed the line
<storage_automount_enabled_hint>true</storage_automount_enabled_hint>to
<storage_automount_enabled_hint>false</storage_automount_enabled_hint>so that only devices which have auto-mount specifically enabled are auto-mounted (the Hardware Abstraction Layer documentation probably provides more info about this, I didn't check it out).
Second: Do a sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart (or perhaps better restart the system, KDE seemed to have some small problems with only the dbus restart).
Update: No, seems I was wrong, it didn't work (at least not for long, stupid Automount is still active :-(
Update, 2005-12-12: Finally! After trying all kinds of tips given on the web ("noauto" option in fstab, HAL, dbus, automount, autofs, ...) I finally stumbled upon the keyword "ivman" (some program/daemon designed to execute stuff when media is inserted like the dreaded autorun under Windows) and lo! ps ax revealed that two instances of this were running. Annoyed as I was at this point I simply de-installed the whole ivman package, rebooted and finally no longer have a system that does stuff that somebody thought oh so useful while it actually is only getting on my nerves ... (yes, I'm still angry :-)
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Last modified: September 11 2008 09:33:09 by Thorsten Thielen URL of this page: www.c2226.de/linux/index.phtml |
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