May 2005 - openSUSE Users - openSUSE Mailing Lists

KDE login Screen
by Mark Panen 02 May '05

02 May '05

Hi I encountered the following two problems after installing Suse 9.3, which I suspect are caused by KDE 3.4: 1. On boot up the login screen is very different. I am presented with a plain white screen which states Welcome at Computername Login: Password: I don't like this login screen and prefer the previous one in Suse 9.2 which is more colourful. How do I change the login screen? Another problem is that in the lower left hand corner of the login screen is a console log for the computer. This xconsole stays open when I log on and needs to be closed manually. Any ideas on how to prevent it from appearing? 2. Shut down Clicking on Logout provides only one option - "End current session". Clicking on "End current session" returns me to the login screen. There is no option to shut down the computer. What needs to be done to ensure that the computer shuts down properly without me having to do it manually?

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Poor Quality Scans from Kooka
by William H Lugg 02 May '05

02 May '05

Well, since I got my scanner working again I started using Kooka to scan a photo. I've noticed that the quality of the product is not too great. The scanned image has several thin (maybe 1 or 2 pixels wide) vertical lines are showing up in the light areas of the scans. I've cleaned the glass on the scanner and have carefully examined the photos but can find nothing that would cause them. Has anyone seen this kind of problem in Kooka before and is there a solution? What scanning frontend are others using that might produce better results? Thanks. -- Bill Lugg Milstar Software Support Peterson AFB, CO

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Id "1" respawning too fast
by Mike 02 May '05

02 May '05

After exiting I get this message and cannot reuse the tty INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes This is now occurring for 1, 3 and 4. 2 is where I started X from. I haven't used up 5 or 6 yet. Is there anyway to fix this? I had some boot trouble earlier and disabled boot.scsidev. -- Collector of vintage computers http://www.ncf.ca/~ba600 Machines to trade http://www.ncf.ca/~ba600/trade.html

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Perplexing Problem
by Stephen P. Molnar, Ph.D. 02 May '05

02 May '05

I have just upgraded from SuSE 9.0 to 9.3 with KDE. I have noticed that when I run some applications, not too sure just which ones as yet, but they seem to be some of my quantum chemical applications, that after I close the application gKrellM is still showing 99% to 100% CPU useage and system response is extremely slow! If I log out and log back in (always as a user, never as root) the KDE boot process hangs on 'Initializing system services'. The only solution is to reboot the machine. This is somewhat of an irritation even though it doesn't take too long. The machine is a 2.4GHz AMD Athlon with 1GB of RAM. Any insights will be appreciated. Thanks in advance. -- Stephen P. Molnar, Ph.D. Life is a fuzzy set Foundation for Chemistry Stochastic and multivariant http://www.geocities.com/FoundationForChemistry

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Re: [SLE] (Semi-OT) Travelstar locked disk
by James Wright 02 May '05

02 May '05

Anders Norrbring wrote: >I'm trying to set up a second IBM (Hitachi) Travelstar 20GB disk for use >with my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop. > >However, it seems like the Travelstar disk is locked by the infamous ATAPI >HDD master lock. > >Does anyone know how to reset the disk? Without sending it to Nortel and >pay them almost $100 to unlock it, 5 times more than I paid for the drive.. > >Anders. > > > Anders, it does not look good. I am still looking. My first suggestion is to contact the person/place you got it from and request the password. Apparently your only other choice is to get a program that reads or resets the firmware on the HDD. A low-level format will not remedy the situation. Pasted from http://forums.actionfront.com/showthread.php?t=292 [quote] The problem with locked drive is two fold. The modern BIOS which are used to set password in the first place usallt encode password which it's sent to the HDD. Meaning if you take that HDD out of the notebook even if you know user/master password you will not be able to unlock the drive with the same password. When data recovery techniques applied to access locked drives, special access to firmware required. Each model of the drive will have different approach to unlock the drives and requires research to be done on each model. Meaning that not all drives have been researched. e.g. latest Hitachi/IBM models are still in research. I believe if you don't know user password and don't have access to original notebook no ATA command will help you. You can send it to the Data Recovery company to unlock the drive, but that may not be cost effective if you don't need data from that drive. [end quote] This is very interesting to me. If certain corporations can do it for big bucks, there is a way. Finding a cost effective way to do it may prove difficult, if not impossible. A solution that may or may not work (at your own risk, of course) i to try an unlocking program for a different type of lock. Check out http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-31610.html. It may help you, but I wouldn't be too hopeful. Look at http://hdd-tools.com/products/rrs/modules/hitachilaptop/ and see if your model is listed here. Some people have reported the ability to unlock Western Digital drives using an XBox hack called atapwd.exe. Apparently you can d/l it from the xbins.org IRC channel. I found at http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/q22000/gee2000918002375.htm [quote] Hard Drive Password - This password is stored on the hard drive itself. Therefore, moving a drive that is protected in this manner to another computer will not allow you to access the drive (unless you know the password). This can be defeated by shorting a jumper on the hard drive itself, but on most ThinkPad models, this will require that the drive housing be partially disassembled. (This will likely damage the drive housing on 760 class machines. 770 class drive housings should be able to be reassembled without too much difficulty. 600 class machines do not have any drive housings. I don't know about other models) [end quote] and [quote] BUT in most of cases it's the SAME as the SuperVisor password, becouse if You set a SuerVisor pasword on an IBM laptop, and it has HDD, it will set the HDD password automatically, and this is the same as supervisor. We cannot restore SuperVisor password from a bare HDD, only, if the laptop is available for this [end quote] All in all it looks a bit hopeless. If I come accross anything else I will let you know. - James W.

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FireFox broken, is SuSE Pro becoming a test bed like Fedora?
by Preston Crawford 02 May '05

02 May '05

I've been watching the happenings on the message boards recently with regards to SuSE 9.3. It seems like it's more bleeding edge and unstable than usual. And now I get a Firefox YOU update where my bookmarks and profile are broken. I can still get to my bookmarks, but I have to select "Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks" then my bookmarks appear after having disappeared. They disappear next time I start Firefox back up. On top of that it doesn't properly recognize my profile, i.e. Firefox looks different than it should. Different X to close down tabs, etc. What is going on with Novell quality control? I'm a little concerned. In the short term I want Firefox to work again. In the long term I want to know that YOU isn't going to thrash my desktop for daily use. I can get that with Fedora if I want. Preston

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Portable KMail
by Jim Flanagan 02 May '05

02 May '05

I was wondering if anyone has, or would it be possible, to make a version of Kmail that is portable. By that I mean made so that you could have it on a CD, or usb drive that you could take with you. Mail and settings could be stored and saved there, and would not be kept on the workstation. Like thunderbird I guess. I have tried thunderbird, esp using win machines, but unless I am missing a setup option, it does not seem to thread messages properly. But, the older versions would just run from a directory, on your desktop or whereever. All you email was stored there too. You could take it all with you. Unfotunately the newer versions have an install routin that installs the app in the normal places. I really like kmail, and was wondering if/how to make it "portable". Pardon the meandering. -- Jim Flanagan linuxjim(a)jjfiii.com

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Re: Why /dev/sda [WAS: can no longer see usb drive]
by Greg Freemyer 02 May '05

02 May '05

On 5/1/05, Colin Carter <colincarter(a)exemail.com.au> wrote: > On Sunday 01 May 2005 23:59, Greg Freemyer wrote: > > On 4/30/05, Colin Carter <colincarter(a)exemail.com.au> wrote: > > > On Sunday 01 May 2005 01:35, Greg Freemyer wrote: > > > > > > Off topic a little, but can you explain the philosophy of SuSE emulating > > > SCSI connection? (I assume that that is what they are doing above.) > > > This emulation actually prevented me from installing SuSE 9.0 as it > > > was reading my DVD drive as IDE until it started to install and then > > > it switched to emulating SCSI and then said it couldn't read the same > > > drive which it had been reading. Ahhhhh! > > > I had to go out and buy 9.1 which (quote SuSE) "fixed that issue". > > > I didn't have an issue with the IDE drive being an IDE drive; why > > > do SuSE make it an issue? I have been told that SCSI is faster, but > > > surely that statement only applies when it is true SCSI and not just > > > and *extra* emulation filter/process? > > > snip > > > > It is not a SuSE issue, it is a Linux Kernel issue, so all the distros > > should behave similarily. > > > > As I understand it, the difference between /dev/hdx and /dev/sdx is > > which basic block driver set you use. > > > > The /dev/hdx series is only used by traditional Parrallel ATA (PATA) > > drives as far as I know. > > > > In addition to SCSI, all the newer drive technologies (SATA / USB / > > Firewire / FC / SAS / iSCSI) are being handled exclusively by the > > /dev/sdx block driver. > > > > The sata kernel library (libata) is slowly being enhanced to support > > PATA drives, so in a year or two I would expect /dev/hdx to simply go > > away for new 2.6 kernels. > > > > Greg > Hi Greg, > Thanks very much for this reply/info. Much appreciated. > I understand what you wrote - very interesting. > But why are most current hard drives ATA-100 ? > I believe that SCSI are generally more expensive. > Is Linux just betting on SCSI being the future? > I don't think it is a bet of ATA drives vs. SCSI drives. My impression is that the SCSI code was better modulorized in the kernel than the ATA / IDE code. Indeed one of the major complaints about the 2.5 kernels (R&D kernels only - pre 2.6) was the "IDE driver mess" (as I recall). In the 2.6 kernel SCSI has at least two layers, the "scsi midlayer" and the LLDD (low level device driver). There is an ongoing effort to put most of the common code in the midlayer and restrict the LLDD to device specific requirements only. With the IDE drivers, I think there is far less common code. So when new types of drive technolgies needed drivers, the kernel developers decided to leverage the existing scsi midlayer code by extending it to handle the new device types. Thus the "scsi midlayer" is evolving into a "storage medium midlayer" or something like that. As I said, the SATA and USB disk drivers were developed around the scsi midlayer. I have seen discussions of the SATA driver (libata) being extended to handle PATA drives. If/When that happens and the current IDE driver is dropped, I think all storage sub-systems (SCSI / PATA / SATA / USB / Firewire / FC / SAS / iSCSI) will be using the "scsi midlayer" and thus will be /dev/sdx devices. HTH Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century

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Another interesting article in theinquirer...
by Basil Chupin 02 May '05

02 May '05

..but about Linux generally this time. www.theinquirer.net and the article is called, "The real Window for Linux". Ciao. -- Minds and parachutes only function properly when open.

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booting 9.3 install on laptop w/ reiserfs root
by Danny Sauer 02 May '05

02 May '05

I've got an old (IBM Thinkpad 760EL) laptop. It won't boot from CD, and I don't have a floppy drive. So, I got an adapter, and hooked up the hard drive in a SuSE 9.2 system. I partitioned the 2GB drive into a 250MB swap partition (hdc2) and a 1.5GB root (hdc1). I formatted the root with reiserfs (default options), ran mkswap on the swap partition, and mounted the root on /mnt. Then I fired up Yast and did the install to directory thing, checking the "run yast on startup to detect hardware" option. I essentially did a "basic with KDE" install, with the thinkpad utils and a few other things added. Then I installed grub to the drive with grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/hdc I forgot to write a grub.conf, but I figured that'd be fine, I'm relatively comfortable with grub's command line. I replaced the drive in the laptop, and fired it up. I got dumped to a grub prompt, as expected. I type root, and it says that it's using (hd0,0), which is correct, AFAIK. It's the only hard drive in the system. Then I type kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 which grub recognizes as a linux bzimage, and I then type "boot". The kernel loads, and then hangs where it should be mounting the root filesystem. It says "Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,1)". A few lines up, it recognizes the hard drive as an IBM ATA disk drive, and sees that hda has 2 partitions, hda1 and hda2. The geometry agrees with what's printed on the drive itself. I've tried specifying an initrd (the one in /boot) with grub, too, and there's the same problem, though the kernel does say that it found a ramdisk before it hangs on the root filesystem. Now, using grub's tab completion, I can see that the device nodes /dev/hda1 and /dev/pts are where they should be. The root filesystem is fine. What I'm wondering is, does the default 9.2 kernel not have reiserfs support? That seems very odd, especially for SuSE. Did I miss something else? I think I did everything required for making a drive bootable, but maybe I missed a step that someone outside the situation can see? I'd appreciate any debugging steps that I'm missing here. I guess I could build a new kernel and put that on this drive, but it's such a pain to take the drive out of the laptop, remove it from the caddy, hook it up to a working machine, etc. :) Thanks. --Danny, probably putting the laptop back up on eBay anyway, since it can't boot from the darn CD-ROM, but it can boot from a *token ring* network.

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