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Xterm Huge Font by Default

Date: Sat, 24 Jul 1999 03:59:08 -0700

When you run X in 1024x768 or 1200x1024 you might notice that a typical xterm comes in a font that's just a bit too small to read.

Of course you can use a [Ctrl]+[Right Mouse Click] to bring up a small menu of alternate fonts (ranging from "Tiny" to "Huge") to interactively change these to a more (or less) readable setting. However, that gets old after awhile, and it's irritating to have to teach that to every new user as we migrate more people from those "legacy" systems like MS Windows.

So, here's how you can change the default font for your xterms.

Basically all you have to do is add an entry to your "X resource database." The "X resource database" is sort of like your shell environment.

Just as the environment contains a list of values associated with names. In the case of the environment you have names like PATH, TERM, HOME, etc. The X resource db contains patterns like XTerm*foreground: X applications (clients) query the X server and get the patterns that most closely match the names of the settings that they are looking for.

Thus the resource pattern XTerm*foreground: matches XTerm.menu.foreground, XTerm.terminal.foreground and XTerm.anything.else.foreground. So, whatever value this resource pattern has (a color, for example) will be used for any settings that don't have a more specific match. If you had XTerm*foreground: Cyan and an XTerm.main.foreground of Wheat then the "main" windows would be set to "Wheat" (an off white color) and all of the others would have a "foreground" color of cyan (a bright bluish green). (I'm just making up some of these names, by the way -- I don't know if xterm looks for any XTerm.main* or XTerm.terminal* etc.

Just as the programs you start under a shell may take settings and options from environment variables, so an X client can take settings from the X server's resource database.

When you start your X server, one of of the things the typical xdm, xinitrc, ~/.Xclients, or ~/.Xsession will do as part of the process is to invoke the xrdb command. So you can set these resources by editing files and restarting X. By default the system will look for a file named ~/.Xdefaults and merge those into any settings that are compiled into the server. In fact you can change your resources without restarting X by using a command like:

 		xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults

So, to change your "normal" font size for your xterms you can use a setting like:

	XTerm*VT100*font: 10x20

... there are many other settings (like X XTerm*VT100*font1: through XTerm*VT100*font6: (which correspond to the tiny, through the Huge settings).

You can get a list of (some) resources using the appres command. Some can be found in the man pages. There is no comprehensive list of these that I know of. I suppose is all in the source code, somewhere!


Redhat 6.0 on a Sharp Widenote

Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 15:30:38 -0500 (CDT)
From: jwang@CS.UH.EDU (John I-Chung Wang)

Hello

I've recently installed Redhat 6.0 on a Sharp Widenote after swapping the factory 1 GB drive for a more suitable 6.4 GB drive purchased over the web.

The interesting thing about the Widenote is that the display is a letter box format (16 x 9) screen which has a resolution of 1024x600. It works just fine at the default 1024x768 settings except that the lower 168 lines are not visible hence the command panel for the enlightenment GUI is not easily used.

Various websites on the Internet had proposed XF86Config files but all of them tried to combine the horizontal modeline arguments of the 1024x768 settings with the vertical modeline arguments of the 800x600 settings. This approach does not work and admittedly, the web pages advocating those settings stated that they still could not get them working.

Well, the solution is far more simple. the display is a 1024x768 display in every respect except that only 1024x600 is visible so you actually want to keep all the timing sections of the 1024x768 modelines the same, except for the 768 which indicates what can be displayed. So just use the LCD 1024x768 XF86Config file except change the one 768 to 600 in each modeline for each 1024x768 setting ie.:

	Modeline "1024x768" 44.9 1024 1048 1208 1264 768 776 784 817
becomes:
	Modeline "1024x768" 44.9 1024 1048 1208 1264 600 776 784 817
	                                             ^^^
	                                       only thing changed

Note there are multiple Modeline's for the 1024x768 setting, I changed all of them to be on the safe side though presumably only one need be changed, I'm just too lazy to figure out which one. Of course, it does mean that if you wish to use the full 1024x768 on the external monitor port, you'll have to swap XF86Config files.

This solves the problem without having to rewrite the XF86Config file from scratch. I thought I would email the Gazette since I'm too lazy to mess with authoring web pages at the moment.

[I moved your PPP question to the Help Wanted section. -Ed]


suprasonic II modem info

Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 05:23:19 -0500
From: Giancarlo Castrataro <weenrdog@bluemarble.net>

To get the suprasonic II modem to function properly, try the following steps:

0) Set modem to jumpered config, boot, and back to PNP (this resets PNP config)
1) Configure modem properly in windows 9X to reasonable settings...
2) I used com1/com2, and irq 3
3) Set bios to PNP OS: NO
4) Ensure that the modem entry in isapnp.conf is commented out (should be already)
5) Use /dev/ttySn and /dev/ttyS(n+1) for each modem respectively

(step zero is if you are having problems with getting the modem to work in win9X)

I also have information on getting the modem to work in windows 98 SE. I found that all I had to change was one registry key, and shotgun shows up under the DUN modem types.

Computer Science Student at Indiana University,
GC


Preventing core dump files from appearing

Date: Sat, 24 Jul 1999 01:11:55 +0200
From: xvudpapc <xvudpapc@savba.sk>

Hi everybody,

I want to contribute with a small but very useful tip. I'm not a programmer, so I'm quite disinterested in linux core dumps and I wondered how to remove them. I found out that this worked. Put it in .bashrc or in a .login script.

	ulimit -c 0

Enjoy,
Juraj


Linux partition sizes

Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 21:54:19 -0600 (MDT)
From: "Michael J. Hammel" <mjhammel@graphics-muse.org> Thus spoke Dana J. Hall <danahall@concentric.net>
My question is, if you would be so kind, could you go into a little more detail. I know how to run fdisk, that is not the problem, but I am a little unclear as to what would go onto the system partition, how large to make it and what is considered data files.

The system partition should be about 2G. That's because if you decide to take the easy route and install everything from a RH distribution you', they get automatically shoved into the system partition.

That said, you should understand I'm talking about KDE and GNOME system libraries and environment files - the core bits of these two. An application written for GNOME or KDE can be installed under /usr/local later, after you download from the net and build it yourself. But the KDE and GNOME environment and development files are likely to go under the system directories during installation. There's really no reason to change this.

red hat manual says the boot partition should be about 16meg and the root partitiion about 500m - 1 gig. They state that all apps go on the root partition but I don't think that is what I want.

Only the apps *they* install will go there. Don't bother trying to separate out the applications to another partition during installation (in fact, I doubt you can do so). What you're separating with multiple partitions is

  1. what comes on the installation CD
  2. the data you create on your own
  3. programs you download and build on your own.

Over time, you end up replacing the tools on the CD with newer versions you download from the net. In most cases, you'll build and install them under /usr/local, then use rpm to remove the original version you installed with RH 6.0. In cases where using rpm to remove the original will break many dependencies (Perl is a good example of this), you can just install the new version, they get automatically shoved into the system partition.

That said, you should understand I'm talking about KDE and GNOME system libraries and environment files - the core bits of these two. An application written for GNOME or KDE can be installed under /usr/local later, after you download from the net and build it yourself. But the KDE and GNOME environment and development files are likely to go under the system directories during installation. There's really no reason to change this.

Any clarification would be much appreciated. I'm what I would call a "liitle past beginner stage, but not much" Linux user. I am a developer, mainly on the Tandem mainframe (about 15 yrs), some windows development and about 2.5 yrs on Linux using as a workstation and developing. My only experience has been with Slackware.

Thanks again,
Dana Hall

Best of luck to you. You should sign up for the Boulder Linux Users Group mailing list. There is always some help there. I still learn things from the folks on that list, but they manage to help just about every level of user.

--
Michael J. Hammel, the Graphics Muse


ssh tip

Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 16:31:33 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Frido Ferdinand <frido@euronet.nl>

Just discovered a neat trick to using ssh-key authentication in a nice way, this will let you connect to remote hosts without typing in your password all the time. It's also very convienient to make (perl) scripts connect to remote hosts without using scary .rhosts/rsh combinations.

To use this just do the following:

1 Install ssh
---------------
You can get the source from: ftp://ftp.cs.hut.fi/pub/ssh/
or RPMS from: ftp://ftp.replay.com/pub/crypto/linux/redhat/i386/


2 Run ssh-keygen
----------------
ssh-keygen - authentication key pair generation
Run it and use a good long passPHRASE. (phrase not word)


3 Edit .xinitrc
---------------
Put in your .xinitrc ssh-agent in front of the command

for example 

	# Window Maker default X session startup script 

	PATH="$PATH:/usr/X11R6/bin"

	exec /usr/local/bin/ssh-agent wmaker
	exec /usr/local/bin/xscreensaver -no-splash &

I think that if you use xdm you should edit your .xsession file.
Now every time you start up ssh-agent, the program that will manage your
ssh-keys, will start up in the background.


4 Run ssh-add
-------------
When you're in X just type in your favourite terminal,

ssh-add

It'll ask you for the passphrase of your key, type it in and your
private key will be loaded in memory.



5 Authorize the remote host 
---------------------------
Now on the host to which you want to connect, do the following:

copy the contents of the generated public key (.ssh/identity.pub) 
to the "authorized_keys" file on the remote host. Be sure to set
the permissions of this file to 600. 

Now connect to your remote host with: ssh remote-host. If everything
goes well you won't need to type in your password but still have
a good secure authentication scheme.


6 Examples
----------

Run command 'ls' on remote host:

	ssh remote-host ls

The ssh-agent uses two environment variables: 

	set | grep SSH gives

	SSH_AGENT_PID=10953
	SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-frido/ssh-10952-agent

In your perl script put:

	$ENV{"SSH_AGENT_PID"} = 10953;
	$ENV{"SSH_AUTH_SOCK"} = "/tmp/ssh-frido/ssh-10952-agent";

And you can do:

	$output=`ssh -q remote-host ls` 
	print $output

I normally use this to call other scripts. This way  you can have one script 
which accesses multiple servers !

There's lots of other things you can do with it, just experiment with it !
Thanks to some of my collegues for some great tips. 


Tips in the following section are answers to questions printed in the Mail Bag column of previous issues.


ANSWER: Toshiba Tecra 8000 and 4030CDT

Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 14:49:10 +0100
From: "Olsson, Hasse" <Hasse.Olsson@cai.com>

Tom Wyrick (twyrick@paulo.com) wrote:

I recently attempted to install RedHat Linux 6.0 on a Toshiba Tecra 8000 notebook computer, and ran into a couple of problems. The first time I installed it, everything appeared to be working properly, except the keyboard keys were too "touchy". Many times, it would act like the keys were sticking and print a character twice when it was pressed once. (I've seen a couple other references to this issue on Usenet, but no solutions were posted.)

After I used Linux for several days on the notebook, I encountered a situation where it didn't unlock the hard drive for read/write usage after it finished performing a disk check with fsck, and subsequent reboots failed due to the file system being stuck in "read only" mode. At this point, I decided to reformat and do another install from scratch. This time around, the only changes I made were #1, not to put the system in runlevel 5 so it started in X immediately upon boot-up, and #2, enabled the apmd service for advanced power management. When this install completed, I had problems right away where Linux would boot - and then I wouldn't be able to type on the keyboard at all. (Every so often, I was able to get control of the keyboard back - but only after multiple reboots by hitting the power button on the notebook.)

Has anyone else out there had any luck running Linux on a Tecra 8000?

Thanks, Tom.

I had the same problem on my old notebook (digital Hinote) and Redhat 6.0. Now I've just installed Linux Mandrake 6.0 on My Tecra 8000 and every thing works perfect. Mandrake has:

You can try to update these or simply get Mandrake..

Just an extra note. On my Hinote I solved the Keyboard problem by connecting an external PS/2 mouse. So this might also be true in your case.

Cheers Hasse

Another response...

Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 15:20:39 -0400 (EDT)

From: Padraic Renaghan <padraic@renaghan.com>

You can find information about Linux on the Toshiba Tecra 8000 at: http://www.shroom.com/linux/laptop/8000.html.

Also take a look at:

You can find information about Linux on the Toshiba 4030CDT at: http://www.gumbley.demon.co.uk/linux-tosh-4030-cdt.html
There is a specific section on that page called "My Custom X Server for the Cyber 9525" that should help you out.

--
Padraic Renaghan


ANSWER: Graphical FTP & sync FTP

Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 15:28:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: Padraic Renaghan <padraic@renaghan.com>

For graphical FTP, I like IglooFTP: http://www.littleigloo.org.

For keeping my webserver, renaghan.com, in sync with the changes I make in my local development area, I like sitecopy: http://www.lyra.org/sitecopy/.

Sitecopy doesn't really synchronize ftp.server1 with ftp.server2 as it replicates changes you make on source.ftpserver to destination.ftpserver.

--
Padraic Renaghan


ANSWER: Dell Optiplex GX1 and the PS/2 Mouse

Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 16:49:22 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Allen D. Tate" <computermantate@yahoo.com>

Someone sent me a solution to my problem. I was sure it would be something simple and it was. The solution is listed below. The original problem is listed below the solution.

The solution:

hey, about your mouse problem in X windows. You probably have /dev/mouse linked to the wrong address. Make sure that ls -l /dev/mouse produces this output:

	ls -l /dev/mouse
	lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 5 Jun 10 06:22 /dev/mouse -> psaux
	 
	and/or make sure in XF86Config:
	 
	Section "Pointer"
	Protocol    "PS/2"
	Device      "/dev/psaux"
	
The problem:
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 07:14:20 -0700 (PDT)
Allen D Tate <computermantate@yahoo.com> asked:

I have a Dell OptiPlex GX1, Pentium II w/64 MB RAM and I'm trying to get X Window up and running but when I run startx, I get no response from the mouse. Has anyone ran into a similar problem? If so how did you fix it? I tried changing the mouse settings in the X86Config file but it didn't seem to help. Any comments or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Allen Tate
Evansville, Indiana


ANSWER: FAT32 and Linux

Date: Mon, 5 Jul 1999 16:27:57 +0530
From: "Aranya" <aranya@bol.net.in> rakeshm@za.ibm.com asked:

I just got a new PC and it came with Win 98 (and FAT32) pre-installed. I also recently read an article saying that Linux does not get along with FAT32. =&gr; LILO can;t be loaded on FAT32. Is this correct ?

I plan on installing Red Hat Linux 6.0 on a seperate slave drive, and having a dual boot. I need to keep my Win98 as well as everyone in the family uses it, and likes Games. Has anyone had any problems with Win98 and Linux ? Is there anything that I have to watch out for ?

Thanks
Regards
Rakesh Mistry

Gone are the days when Linux did not support FAT32. AFAIK, the last version of the kernel that DIDN'T support FAT32 was 2.0.32 and since then, FAT32 has been a part of the vfat fs. Since, RH Linux 6.0 has a 2.2.x kernel, there is absolutely no problem with making it co-exist with Win98 or using LILO.

Akshat


ANSWER: Vertical scroll bars and fvwm95

Date: Wed, 07 Jul 1999 14:17:54 +0200
From: "Remco Schellekens" <rse@dasc.nl>

In reply to your question how to get scrollbars in xterm under fvwm95:

It's not that difficult as you think it is. Under SUSE you probably have a= .fvwm-whateverfile in youre home directory, otherwise use the system.fvwm-whatever-rc file commonly located= in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm.. Now look for xterm startup instructions (Exec xterm ......) and make sure= switch "-sb", wich enables the scrollbar, is included. By the way press CTRL+Middle mouse button on an xterm, and= first function you can set/reset is "enable scrollbar" no matter what kind of window manager you are using.

Greetings,
Remco


ANSWER: KODAK Picture Disk & gimp

Date: Wed, 07 Jul 1999 10:52:52 -0500
From: "Richard N. Turner" <rnturn@baxter.com>

About the inverted images you get back from Kodak:

You must remember that the image you see through viewfinder of your camera is actually projected and recorded upside down on the film (just like it is on your retina) and that's why Kodak stores them that way. Just kidding... I've been getting pictures on Kodak's floppies and have wondered about the inverted images as well. (The camera /does/ record them upside down, though.)

Seriously, you can use "xv", which should be available on your RH5.1 CD-ROM, to invert the upside images that you receive on the Kodak disk. At least that's what I've used. It may be possible to pull this off using the GIMP but I've yet to find such an option among the gazillion other things it can do.

[In the GIMP, right-click on the image to get the pop-up menu. Choose "Image / Transforms / Rotate". Select 180 and press OK. -Ed.]

BTW, I've heard that "xv" may not be part of the newer RH distributions. I hope that's not true; I've been using "xv" since I was running Consensys SVR4.2 on my old '486 and have gotten so used to it. I still use it to load JPEGs on my root window and haven't found a substitute that can do that yet.

Another response...

Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 17:07:19 +0200
From: sleske@filesvr1-cddi.informatik.uni-essen.de (Leske Sebastian)

If I understand you correctly, the pictures you load from the photo CD are upside down and you simply want to correct that, i.e. turn them around. To do that, you can use the 'rotate' function from the 'Transform tool' in gimp. In principle that lets you do rotation by any angle you want, but by holding the Ctrl-key, it lets you select the rotation angle in 15-degree steps. Just rotate the image by 180 degrees, and it should be 'right-side-up'.

As an alternative, consider using the ImageMagick tool (available from just about any Linux ftp site, and a part of most distributions). The 'display' program (part of ImageMagick), has a function to rotate an image by 90 degrees (key / ), you would just have to do that twice to get the desired effect. If you want, you can also automate the process with the 'mogrify' program (also part of ImageMagick). To rotate the file picture.jpeg in your currnent directory, just enter: mogrify -rotate 180 picture.jpeg The advantage of this is that the process works automatically. mogrify -rotate 180 *.jpeg for example, would rotate ALL jpeg-pics in your current directory. That's probably easier than doing it by hand for every picture. You should know, however, that mogrify overwrites the original picture file with the transformed version, so if you want to keep the original file, you should copy it first before using mogrify. (If the files are directly from the CD then you have the CD anyway, so then you won't need to make a copy).

I hope that helps. I'd like to know whether those tips did the job for you, maybe you could send me a short mail telling me whether it worked or not.

Greetings,
Sebastian Leske


ANSWER: xterm Scrollbars

Date: Wed, 07 Jul 1999 11:07:57 -0500
From: "Richard N. Turner" <rnturn@baxter.com>

Kedric,

The default xterm does not include scrollbars when you run it.

You can fix this manually for each xterm by bring up the "VT Options" menu by holding down "Ctrl" and clicking the middle mouse button (or chording the left and right buttons if your a two-button mouse user). You should see listed as the first menu item "Enable Scrollbar" which, in your case, is probably unchecked. Turn it on and you'll get a scrollbar.

If you always want a scrollbar you'll need to get into the menu definitions for fvwm95 and fix the command for launching an xterm. You'll probably want to include some xterm options so your xterm command will look something like:

     xterm -sb -sl 512

These options mean:

     -sb        ! Turn on a scrollbar.
     -sl 512    ! Save 512 lines in the scrollback buffer.

See the xterm(1x) for other useful options that you could specify.


ANSWER: Linux Gazzette Question

Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 10:16:29 -0700
From: Ted23 <ted23@isle.net>

I have had similiar problems with Windows98 and Linux with FAT32 partitions. What I chose to do was to first install Windows98 with FAT32 partitions on the entire drive. Then use a 3rd party software such as Partition Magic 4.0 to cut the hard drive in half both at FAT32 and preserveing my Windows games,...er I mean data. Then Install Linux, using disk druid on the unused partition, and completely reformatting it over to LInux partitions. I have had no problems doing that and have installed many dual boot systems that way. If you need some more help feel free to contact me.

Ted23 http://www.asenteck.com/~ted23


ANSWER: Netflex3 cards on redhat

Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 02:58:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: "John E. Vincent" <john@lusis.org> Subject: (fwd)

As far as I remember from setting up a friend's machine, you would need to compile or install the module for the TI thunderLAN cards. I hope this is a step in the right direction for you although I can't remeber the module name itself.

John Vincent


ANSWER: IPChaining and Firewall rules

Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 07:46:10 -0600
From: Warren Young <tangent@cyberport.com>

In Issue 43 of the Linux Gazette, the following appeared in the Mailbag:

I have a small home network with 5 systems. I use Linux as my proxy/firewall/dial-upon demand internet server and fileserver. Before I upgraded to RH6 I could go to any site on the Web. Now with RH6 I cannot get to some sites. ie: www.hotmail.com, www.outpost.com and www.iomega.com to name a few. I can get to them from my Linux box but not from the network. It sends the request and I see some data return but then everything stops.

I just tried, and those sites worked fine from my Win98 box which is proxied to the Internet via a RH6 box.

I think perhaps you are missing a few important rules, such as rules to allow DNS replies. My own script for enabling masquerading and firewalling is available at www.cyberport.com/~tangent/ix/scripts/.

That script is quite a bit more complicated than yours, but it offers a much tighter firewall. Plus, it's very well commented, so you should have no trouble modifying it to meet your needs. You should only have to modify the variables at the top of the script and leave the rest alone.

You should still read through the rest of the script, however, to ensure that its actions are acceptable to you. For example, it opens inbound Web access. This may be harmless, but if your webserver holds private documents, you'll want to comment that rule out.

Good luck.

Another response...

Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 13:42:15 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ray Van Dolson <rayvd@bludgeon.shocking.com>

I had a similar problem using my Slack 4.0 box as the masquerading gateway... looks like your timeouts are ok, but I don't think it hurts to increase those a little... here's what fixed the problem for me though:

Open your local ethernet init script (for me it's /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1, it's the file with the ifconfig eth0 lines in it, use grep if you're not sure). Look for a line similar to this one:

/sbin/route add -net ${NETWORK} netmask ${NETMASK} eth0

This line sets up the eth0 routing table... make it look like this:

/sbin/route add -net ${NETWORK} netmask ${NETMASK} window 8192 eth0

Below or nearby there should also be a line to set up your gateway route, looking similar to the above. Do the same thing basically, here's what my line looks like:

/sbin/route add default gw ${GATEWAY} netmask 0.0.0.0 window 8192

In short, I think the problem has something to do with the packets being sent from your masq box to the web box being either too large or too small or are not reassembled correctly... setting this window setting seems to correct it though!

Hope it works for you...


ANSWER: Any inetd wizards out there?

Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 08:06:46 -0600
From: Warren Young <tangent@cyberport.com> Subject: Re:

Your 2-cent tips column in issue 43 contained an answer to a question about using inetd to bind a given server to a particular address on a server with several virtual IPs. While the solution will work if you just want a given server to work on _one_ of those IPs, you can't, for example, run two different FTP daemons, each configured differently, and have inetd choose which ftpd to use depending on the requested IP address.

The correct answer to the original question is that inetd is not terribly useful for virtual hosting. Virtual hosting requires servers that know how to bind to a single IP address on their own. You then run multiple copies of that server, each configured for a different IP address.

I suppose it's possible to change inetd to allow what the original poster wanted, but so far as I know none of the alternative inetds does this. If you're _really_ interested in this feature, you might want to join one of the alternative inetd development projects (xinetd looks closest) and add your feature. There's a pretty good chance that the regular inetd people won't be interested in your patch because it would require changes to the inetd.conf file format. xinetd has already changed that format, so they should be open to other changes.


ANSWER: Installing Linux on > 2gb drives

Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 19:02:09 +0100
From: "Ray" <rjsinplym@btinternet.com>

Just been browsing the magazine for the first time today and thought I'd respond to the question of using large hard drives.

It's not a tip just an observation that I've installed Suse 6.0, RH 5.2 and then RH 6 on a 10.2 gb drive with now problems at all. The linux partition was on the last 2 GB of the drive, well outside the 2 gb maximum. The RH manual states that it's down to the bios as regards whether this will work or not so I would guess that it's possible on the mojority of new(ish) PC's. Mine is a year & a half old but worked ok. The only problem I had was that when I tried to compile a new kernel and update lilo using yast with suse 6 it then reported the error of the kernel lying outside the 2gb limit.

sincerely
Ray Smith


ANSWER: X won't start

Date: Sat, 24 Jul 1999 16:54:02 +0200 (CEST)
From: Roland Smith <rsmith@xs4all.nl>

Concerning your error:

	execve failed for /ect/X11/X (errno 2)

Errno 2 means "no such file or directory" (see /usr/include/asm/errno.h).

The file /etc/X11/X which shoud be a symbolic link to the X server, does not exist. It implies that your X installation is not complete, the configuration program has not made the correct link. Most of the time this is the last thing the configuration program does.

If you know which X server you should use, do the following: (supposing you use the XF86_S3 server, like I do) "ln -s /usr/X11R6/bin/XF86_S3 /etc/X11/X"

Now X should start if correctly configured.

Regards, Roland


ANSWER: FAT Compatibility

Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 17:31:49 +0200
From: sleske@filesvr1-cddi.informatik.uni-essen.de (Leske Sebastian)

you sent an e-mail to the Linux Gazette asking about FAT Compatibility:

At work I have a Linux (Redhat 6.0) workstation and at home I have a WinnNT machine. What are some good utils that I could use to write to a disk with a FAT fs under Linux? (I'm assuming that this would be easier than trying to get NT to read ext2...)

Maybe I can help here. The Linux kernel has built-in FAT support. All you need to do is to mount the disk (hard disk or floppy disk, it doesn't really matter) with a FAT filesystem. Then you will be able to access it just like a Linux disk.

How you do that depends on your system setup. You could either add an entry to your /etc/fstab file or mount 'by hand' using the mount command.

This is explained in detail in the 'DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO', which can be found at any site of the Linux Documentation Project. A list of mirrors is at http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/mirrors.html. Use any mirror and to go the 'Howto' section.

I hope that helps. I'd be interested to know whether you've been able to solve your problem, maybe you could send me an email if you've found your solution. Otherwise, feel free to mail me for more info.

Greetings,
Sebastian Leske


Published in Linux Gazette Issue 44, August 1999


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