July 2001 - openSUSE Edu - openSUSE Mailing Lists

Small memory machine
by Phil Driscoll 20 Jul '01

20 Jul '01

I've been 'tweaking' the SuSE 7.2 installation on the 32Mb RAM machine and now have 8Mb free RAM once the machine is up and running and a user has logged in to the blackbox window manager. I will be losing a small amount of this memory once I've installed a SAMBA client (looks like 1.3M for smbmount). The main tweaks were to do with making sure that the machine was running as few unnecessary services as possible. The biggest single 'win' was getting rid of tty 2 to 6 (5 sets of 600K). I also got rid of the X console since the user's won't be interested in what it says! I'm using xdm for login since that seems most memory efficient. I had thought that a command line login followed by xinit would use less memory, but it seems to use slightly more. Also, I thought that going from 16Bit colour to 8 bit colour might improve things, but the change caused X to use about 1Mb more RAM! One day I might understand all this stuff, and know why this is :) I am currently musing over the remaining 'memory hogs' to see if I can work my way around to not having them running all the time, or indeed, at all. The potential sources of more free memory are: cron (660K) atd (612K) Since the machines will be switched off every evening and on again in the morning, I suspect that any important jobs these are doing can be done at boot time. klogd (964K) - Kernel logging - if that's all it does then we'll never be looking at the output. Is it important - does it do other stuff, or is there a way of sending stuff to /dev/null syslogd (636K) - as per klogd possibly tty1? (604K) The users will definitely never go there, but is it required for startup? If any gurus have thoughts on the above, I'd love to hear them. Another 3Mb RAM represents nearly a 50% increase in available memory, and it would mean we could run KWord or KSpread without using swap. Thanks to all those who recommended the blackbox window manager. If anyone is interested, I have done a few tweaks to the source to remove or hide a couple of features I thought might be confusing, and I'd be happy to pass them on. Firstly I thought that the toolbar was really just a waste of screen real-estate since it doesn't serve as an application launcher, so I changed the code so it is always invisible. The other thing I didn't like was the way it handles 'iconise' - by hiding the window and making an entry on the 'icons' sub menu. It struck me that this was not very intuitive behaviour - especially for Windows and Risc OS users who expect an iconised window to be visible in some form on screen. Particularly in the context of our small machines, I thought that this behaviour would be likely to cause users to rerun the software - which would have us running out of RAM in no time. So, I have removed the iconise button from the window title bars and also completely got rid of the right button menu from the window title bar. Another outstanding issue I'd like to resolve is to get some visual indication that an application is starting up. Large KDE applications (e.g. Konqueror, KWord) can take 20 - 30 seconds before a window appears on screen. In my office I can tell that something is happening because I can hear the disc thrashing, but in a noisy classroom, the kids will wait a while, assume that they hadn't clicked properly and rerun the application. If anyone knows of any utility which can wrap application start in some kind of hourglass display or similar, please let me know. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll

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Lotus 1123 & Wordpro Under WINE on LTSP?
by Alan Harris 20 Jul '01

20 Jul '01

Hi all, Two questions :- 1. Has anybody experience of running Lotus applications under WINE? 2. Has anybody any ideas if Lotus & WINE operate / run under LTSP? We have been allocated approx £61K for ICT developments leading to a community school . I have proposed an LTSP based solution BUT, can only go ahead if present software will operate under WINE. I hope somebody can help here as the future otherwise becomes to horrible to contemplate (If it does not then the horrible solution that will be imposed on me involves M$ office) and I'll have to resign and go find a job in IT on the Indian Sub-Continent! Sometimes I think (well in fact I'm convinced) that ICT education and the future of this country are on a fast and very slippery downhill road to oblivion! Alan ----------------------------------------------------- Alan Harris Network Manager Bryngwyn School Tel : 01554 750661 Fax : 01554 758255 E-mail: alanh(a)bryngwyn.carmarthen.sch ----------------------------------------------------- Notes: 1. The contents of this email may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown purposes! Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000. 2. The opinions expressed in this email are personal and may not be shared by Bryngwyn School. -----------------------------------------------------

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Backups with CD-R's
by Simon Wood 20 Jul '01

20 Jul '01

Greetings fellow Linux Users, I'm having difficulty getting my head around the concept of using CD-R's for backup, and backup in general. I would like to back up areas of my machine totalling around 300MByte I can see that there are two ways..... 1) I can take an area of the file-system and write it direct to a CD. This has the advantage that it can easily be mounted by a novice user to view/recover a deleted file. 2) I can TAR up areas of file-system into single files (i.e. backup-home-20Jul2001.tar.gz) and store these somewhere. I can even get a little bit more adventurous and do incremental backups where I only store the files that have changed. My trouble comes with the concept/desire to use multi-session CD so I don't waste large areas of the disks. Can somebody please explain (in simple terms) how the sessions of multi-session CD blend together and how the file names (or new, deleted or changed files) appear in the directories. For the 1) situation will this remove my ability to recover a file to a state before it was changed? There is also the question on security of data, once written to CD it is in theory readable by anyone who can get their hands on the CD. Has anyone tried encrypting the resultant file/image, with GPG for example? If the best way is to use tar (or something similar), is there an easy to follow method for restoring a particular file from a given day? Of course there may be an application that will do all this for me, any recommendations. Thanks in advance, Simon Wood

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automounting now working
by James & Cybèle 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

Thanks to all, especially Gary and THomas My cd images are now automounting using /root/mdk.iso /mnt/mdk iso9660 ro,loop=/dev/loop0 1 1 in fstab thanks again James but..........I have 5 CDs all working this way but Encarta2000 doesn't ( no smart comments please). When I try to run it from Win98 is says it is invalid win32 files. The only thing I can see is that all the files have lower case names........

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Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Re: [Wylug-discuss] Acrobat 5 does not read ps2pdf'd files
by Malcolm Herbert 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

hmmm, all you Latex --> pdf'ers instead of pdflatex, use latex --> dvips --> ps2pdf means that you dont have to convert those eps diagrams. Better output. Acroread in later version has also stopped loading some pdf's, so you try xpdf instead. Sometimes its the other way round Malcolm On Thursday 19 July 2001 11:36, Damian Counsell wrote: > Sent the gist of this to Gary, but forgot to circulate it to the list: > > I'm worried about changes in Acrobat 5.0 too because I have happily > settled into making all my formatted documents with LaTeX and then > distributing them as PDFs to everyone else (using 'pdflatex'). > > Adobe will definitely not want to annoy long-term customers by losing > backward compatibility with millions of archived documents, so things > *should* be OK for well-formed code generated by Open programs. > > That isn't to say that Acrobat 5.0 isn't infested. Get your crucifixes > and garlic out, people; the full horror and how to cope with the pain > can be found here: > > http://www.micropress-inc.com/acr5bugs.htm > > > > -- > Damian COUNSELL > http://www.icr.ac.uk/cmb/bioinformatics/ CMB Bioinformatics > phone: +44 020 7352 8133 x5226 Institute of Cancer Research > direct: +44 020 7878 3850 > London SW3 6JB fax: +44 020 7351 3325 -- ------------------------------------ Malcolm Herbert Red Hat Europe t:+44 1483 734955 m:+44 7720 079845 ------------------------------------

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Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] A little too pedantic. (was: Acrobat 5 does not read ps2pdf'd files)
by Azrael Angel Of Death 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

>Perfectly good question. Flame-thrower holstered I'd say that Adobe make >most >of their money from selling PDF-generating software to big corporations who >then go on to sell the output from these systems to *their* customers. > >Imagine you'd spent thousands on such a system for converting your >proprietary >format document archives to PDFs for your clients to view---since Adobe's >salesperson had told you that anyone could get hold of and run the viewer >(which is, as you point out, free) easily. Then imagine your support line >clogged up with paying customers complaining that, ever since they'd >"upgraded" >their PDF viewer to version 5, they'd been unable to read your stock >reports or >annual accounts or brochures. > >At this point in the sorry story which way would you, as a person in an >Armani >suit, be pointing your trained attack lawyers?.... > If you had created the pdf in Adobe's program.. then any customer can view it using the freely available Acrobat Reader. That at least would be a valid couter from Adobe... in fact.. they could go so far as to say that by limiting the access of other non-Adobe programs to viewing your work they are protecting you. As other pdf-viewing programs can actually bypass the password protection. How would said company respond to their passworded pdf being easily read and edited by third party software? _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

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RE: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Lotus 1123 & Wordpro Under WINE on LT SP?
by Simon Wood 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

> -----Original Message----- > From: Alan Harris [SMTP:alanh@bryngwyn.carmarthen.sch.uk] > Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 12:22 PM > To: Schools List; southwales(a)lists.lug.org.uk > Subject: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Lotus 1123 & Wordpro Under WINE on LTSP? > > Hi all, > > Two questions :- > > 1. Has anybody experience of running Lotus applications under WINE? > > 2. Has anybody any ideas if Lotus & WINE operate / run under LTSP? [Simon Wood] You can check the wine application database at: http://appdb.codeweavers.com/ [Simon Wood] Unfortunely there is only mention of 'Notes'.

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A little too pedantic. (was: Acrobat 5 does not read ps2pdf'd files)
by Azrael Angel Of Death 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

Just had to dive in with an observation... flame me if I'm wrong :) >From: Damian Counsell <counsell(a)icr.ac.uk> >Adobe will definitely not want to annoy long-term customers by losing >backward compatibility with millions of archived documents, so things >*should* be OK for well-formed code generated by Open programs. Isn't the Acrobat Reader free? Does that mean people using it aren't technically customers? And any customers would have bought something different.. eg Acrobat Writer... yet still the reading element of the program is free... so even if it doesn't work properly it's only the freebie at fault.. what you actually _paid_ for would work. *puts on his asbestos suit with the pedant label* _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

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Re: [Wylug-discuss] Acrobat 5 does not read ps2pdf'd files
by Gary Stainburn 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

On Wednesday 18 July 2001 8:25 pm, Martin Rowe wrote: > On Tuesday 17 July 2001 16:31, Gary Stainburn wrote: > > I've just been talking to someone who's trying to sell us a document > > storeage system, and he mentioned in passing that he had a meeting with > > Adobe last week. > > > > In this meeting he mentined that Acrobat 5 fails to read PDF files > > generated by Ghostscript (ps2pdf) amongst other. The Adobe rep stated > > that in the past, Adobe has encouraged pdf writed being created by 3rd > > parties. > > Odd. I tried Acrobat 5 on some AS/400 reports I converted with ps2pdf > (from enscript output) from this time last year to a few months ago, and > they all display fine. > I've also done some checking out and I have no problems reading the invoices I produce by writing postscript and doing ps2pdf, or the docs I produce using db2pdf from the Docbook tools. I'm now starting to suspect that it is this sales gadgi trying to pull a fast one on me - using very valid bad publicity about AR5 as a basis - and trying to get me to buy distiller. However, Adobe have said that they will not support/fix bugs found in AR5 that only show up when reading non-Adober generated documents. [snip] -- Gary Stainburn This email does not contain private or confidential material as it may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000

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still no automounting
by James & Cybèle 18 Jul '01

18 Jul '01

Hi A couple of months back I got some good advice from Simon Wood and others about mounting CD-Rom images >[Simon Wood] >You can create a binary copy of the contents of a CD >to a file on the disk with: >dd if=/dev/hdc of=cd_image_1.iso bs=1024K >assuming /dev/hdc (secondary master) is you cdrom >drive, 'bs' just sets the block size and speeds up the >copy. >Then you can mount this image as if it were a normal >CD with: >mount -t iso9660 -o loop >cd_image_1.iso /fake_cdrom1 This works brilliantly but I'm having problems adding these to fstab. Every way I try it doesn't like. If the image is mounted as /cdshare/img1/img.iso can someone suggest the correct instructions to stick in fstab? Thanks James Carter

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