Nabble - Fedora List

Re: changing GDM background image on F12

2009-11-28T20:37:53Z

On 11/29/2009 01:50 AM, Martin Airs wrote:

> On 11/29/2009 01:38 AM, fred smith wrote:
>> On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 11:36:32AM +1030, Tim wrote:
>>> On Sat, 2009-11-28 at 17:48 -0500, fred smith wrote:
>>>> I'd like to change the GDM (login) screen wallpaper
>>> You could try the brute force and ignorance method: Find the graphic
>>> currently used, and simply replace the picture file with your own.
>>>
>>> I did that with my laptop, since none of the "correct" ways to
>>> configure
>>> GDM had any effec. That was with Fedora 7 and 11, I haven't tried 12
>>> yet.
>> belive me, I'm tempted!
>> :)
>>
> try editing the file....
>
> /usr/share/backgrounds/constantine/default/constantine.xml
>
> and change the constantine.png to your own file in every instance of
> the name constantine.png
>
> just a thought
>
> Martin
>

this is how I changed my gnome login background

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Re: Default keyring for NetworkManager

2009-11-28T20:32:28Z

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 07:20, Frank Elsner <Frank.Elsner@...> wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:26:39 +0000 Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> First of all: Do not use Network Manager.

I don't get it--why should he not use NetworkManager?

-Ryan

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Re: changing GDM background image on F12

2009-11-28T20:20:13Z

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 05:56:20PM -0800, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:

>
> Todd Zullinger <tmz@...> writes:
> > As the subject says, he's trying to change the background for the GDM
> > screen. Since GDM doesn't provide a panel, there isn't really a
> > convenient way to browse to system->preferences->appearance... :)
> >
> > Using gconftool-2 is generally the best way to achieve this, and works
> > fine for me on F-12 (as it has in past releases). Why it's not
> > working for Fred remains to be seen.
>
> You can also set it as a user's background via the normal preferences
> setting and then make that the system default (via the bottom "Make
> Default" button).

been there. done that. didn't work. which is the reason for the
ongoing thread.

thanks anyway.

--
---- Fred Smith -- fredex@... ------------------------ ----
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
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----------------------------- Isaiah 40:28 (niv) -----------------------------

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Re: F12 EEEPC 1000H WLAN with hidden SSID no go

2009-11-28T19:34:39Z

Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:

> Robert Moskowitz <rgm@...> writes:
>
>> Actually WPA2 with 802.1X authentication is REALLY tight. No MITM
>> will crack EAP TLS (EAP TLS is a little different than the TLS used in
>> the most recent attack). Then use AES CCMP (not TKIP).
>>
>
> And there we have the real way in protecting a wifi access point: turn
> off WEP, WPA (v1), and TKIP (under WPA2). Leave only WPA2 and CCMP.
> Then let the computer choose a 64-bit hex number for the shared key.
>
> Too bad the good advice is always drowned out by the hordes that claim
> hiding SID's and changing port number on ssh are the way to get
> security. (For ssh turn off everything but RSA and DSA -- this way the
> computer chooses a strong "password" (really a secret key) for you.)
>
>
>> Of course your management frames are not protected. That is 802.11w
>> that will soon be in products....
>>
>> BTW, I worked on the 802.11 standards. I use past tense, as in June
>> my management had me move over to work on 802.15 standards. (I was in
>> Atlanta last week for the 802 meeting).
>>
>
> Thank you for speaking up! Will the new protocols require any HW
> support or are they drop-in replacements on current wifi nodes?

802.11w will 'just' be a firmware upgrade. It was approved by RevComm
back in September, so it is up to the vendors to decide which shipping
products will support it.

> Will all the packets now be cryptographically protected?

Well, you can't protect BEACONs, PROBEs, ASSOCIATIONs, AUTHENTICATIONs,
as there are no keys yet!

But DISASSOCIATE, the one I used in my attack against hidden SSIDs, can
be authenticated, thus stopping this particular attack. But there are
other ways, like flooding attacks to force a client to PROBE, thus
exposing the SSID; just a little harder.

802.11s has a way to establish keying in the AUTHENTICATE exchange.
There is talk about how to 'retrofit' that to non-mesh authentication.
It seems that no one wants to open Pandora's box and shortcut this
change, and it will have to go the PAR route and take a couple years. Sigh.

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Re: Bug in /etc/cron.d/mlocate.cron or am I crazy?

2009-11-28T19:18:45Z

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 05:34:28PM -0500, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> Now you've jinxed it! I'll betcha a buck that Murphy is subscribed to this
> list and that's the next thing that's going to happen. It'll probably be a
> feature of ZFS. ;-)

I'm willing to bet up to *three* imaginary dollars that ZFS will be
called something like "zfs". :)

> I'm willing to work with this approach, but then the proper way to do it in
> awk would be as follows:
> nodevs=$(< /proc/filesystems awk -F '\t' '/^nodev/ && NF==2 { print $2 }')

Well, I think might as well go with the more straightforward syntax of

nodevs=$(awk -F '\t' '/^nodev/ && NF==2 { print $2 }' < /proc/filesystems)

but yeah. File a bug. :)
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Re: expect command spawns incorrectly

2009-11-28T19:04:36Z

On 11/28/09 19:13, quoth Donald Russell:

>
>
> On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 15:47, Steven W. Orr <steveo@...
> <mailto:steveo@...>> wrote:
>
> On 11/28/09 02:43, quoth Donald Russell:
> > I am trying to use the expect program to automate an sftp process....
> >
> > The expect file begins with
> >
> > spawn sftp -oProxyCommand='....' user@host
> > expect "password:"
> > send "sesame\n"
> > expect "sftp> "
>
> Try this:
>
> send "sesame\r"
>
>
> I'll try that, but I'm not hopeful.
>
> The command that is spawned fails... I get the "usage" as if all that
> was spawned was "sftp" and not the entire command. So it doesn't even
> get to the "expect password" part, regardless of whether I'm using \n or
> \r in the "send".
>
> And I gather there is no such character on the "spawn" line... the
> command is just taken to be the literal characters up to the end-of-line.
> Do I need to escape anything? As I mentioned, if I cut/past the command
> into a shell.. it works fine... it's just got being spawned properly by
> expect. (Or I'm doing something wrong :-( )
>

Ok. One last suggestion. It sounds like you might have a quoting problem.

eval spawn "sftp -oProxyCommand='....' user@host"

I'm assuming that you are using the single quotes to contain an argument that
may have possible embedded white space. In case there is no white space, it'll
probably also work without the single quotes. By default spawn will echo what
it's doing. You can stop that via the -noecho option.

Don't forget that expect is not a language of its own. It's just an extension
to the tcl language. tcl is what provides the eval. ;-)

--
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Re: Setting up a VM to run XP in an up-to-date F12 box?

2009-11-28T18:55:56Z

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Sam Sharpe <lists.redhat@...> wrote:
<...snip..>
> My advice would be to try using Virt-Manager in Fedora (providing you
> have recent hardware) and see how you get on. It really really isn't
> that difficult. If it's not working for you, then investigate
> VirtualBox or even VMWare Player.

The only thing about VMWare Player is that you must use the MAC address space
specified by VMWare. VirtualBox let's you choose what MAC address you want. But
this is only an issue in special cases such as licensed software tied
up to a specific
MAC address.

~af

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Re: changing GDM background image on F12

2009-11-28T18:38:53Z

On 11/28/2009 09:03 PM, Mikkel wrote:

> On 11/28/2009 07:56 PM, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
>>
>> Todd Zullinger<tmz@...> writes:
>>> As the subject says, he's trying to change the background for the GDM
>>> screen. Since GDM doesn't provide a panel, there isn't really a
>>> convenient way to browse to system->preferences->appearance... :)
>>>
>>> Using gconftool-2 is generally the best way to achieve this, and works
>>> fine for me on F-12 (as it has in past releases). Why it's not
>>> working for Fred remains to be seen.
>>
>> You can also set it as a user's background via the normal preferences
>> setting and then make that the system default (via the bottom "Make
>> Default" button).
>>
>> -wolfgang
> Would that affect GDM's background, or only the Gnome desktop's
> background? They are not the same thing.
>
> Mikkel
>

Yes, if you set a default background it effects the GDM background, but
takes restarting GDM (or a reboot) to see it.

Will

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Re: changing GDM background image on F12

2009-11-28T18:27:46Z

On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:48:50 -0500
fred smith <fredex@...> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 01:53:14PM -0500, Todd Zullinger wrote:
> > Bill Davidsen wrote:
> > > Could you explain a little more what you are trying to do?
> > >
> > > If you're just trying to change the wallpaper, what happens when
> > > you just use the standard menu to do that? Or are you trying to do
> > > something more?
> > >
> > > What behavior do you get when you (from memory)
> > > system->preferences->appearance->background->add->{select a
> > > file} and if by default you mean system wide, the [make default]
> > > button may help
> >
> > As the subject says, he's trying to change the background for the
> > GDM screen. Since GDM doesn't provide a panel, there isn't really a
> > convenient way to browse to system->preferences->appearance... :)
> >
> > Using gconftool-2 is generally the best way to achieve this, and
> > works fine for me on F-12 (as it has in past releases). Why it's
> > not working for Fred remains to be seen.
>
> As Todd says, I'd like to change the GDM (login) screen wallpaper. I
> had accidentally stumbled into that in F10, and never really knew how
> I had done it (but liked the image it ended up with so I left it.)
> but then my SSD went bad and when I got it back from repair I
> installed F11 and never pursued this, but now that I've done an
> update to F12 I'd like to change the image again. I thought that
> choosing "make default" in the tool Bill suggests would do it, but it
> doesn't. so I've also tried the command (shown in earlier emails in
> this thread but somehow purged from this one) using gconftool-2 and
> it didn't work either.
>
> i've put the image in /usr/share/backgrounds/images, but a lot of the
> discussion I've seen of this just say "/usr/share/backgrunds", so is
> it possible that it should not go in any of hte subdirs there? doesn't
> seem to make sense, as I specified the full path to the file when I
> ran gconftool-2.
>
>

It's apparent that even after the above is spelled out, users still
can't read. The Op is speaking of the Gnome Login background (GNOME
LOGIN BACKGROUND)...

NOT the users DESKTOP BACKGROUND.

Un Effin' believable...

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Re: changing GDM background image on F12

2009-11-28T18:03:41Z

On 11/28/2009 07:56 PM, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:

>
> Todd Zullinger <tmz@...> writes:
>> As the subject says, he's trying to change the background for the GDM
>> screen. Since GDM doesn't provide a panel, there isn't really a
>> convenient way to browse to system->preferences->appearance... :)
>>
>> Using gconftool-2 is generally the best way to achieve this, and works
>> fine for me on F-12 (as it has in past releases). Why it's not
>> working for Fred remains to be seen.
>
> You can also set it as a user's background via the normal preferences
> setting and then make that the system default (via the bottom "Make
> Default" button).
>
> -wolfgang

Would that affect GDM's background, or only the Gnome desktop's

background? They are not the same thing.

Mikkel
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for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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Re: changing GDM background image on F12

2009-11-28T17:56:20Z

Todd Zullinger <tmz@...> writes:
> As the subject says, he's trying to change the background for the GDM
> screen. Since GDM doesn't provide a panel, there isn't really a
> convenient way to browse to system->preferences->appearance... :)
>
> Using gconftool-2 is generally the best way to achieve this, and works
> fine for me on F-12 (as it has in past releases). Why it's not
> working for Fred remains to be seen.

You can also set it as a user's background via the normal preferences
setting and then make that the system default (via the bottom "Make
Default" button).

-wolfgang
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non-overlapping WIFI channels?

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Re: changing GDM background image on F12

2009-11-28T17:50:29Z

On 11/29/2009 01:38 AM, fred smith wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 11:36:32AM +1030, Tim wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 2009-11-28 at 17:48 -0500, fred smith wrote:
>>
>>> I'd like to change the GDM (login) screen wallpaper
>>>
>> You could try the brute force and ignorance method: Find the graphic
>> currently used, and simply replace the picture file with your own.
>>
>> I did that with my laptop, since none of the "correct" ways to configure
>> GDM had any effec. That was with Fedora 7 and 11, I haven't tried 12
>> yet.
>>
> belive me, I'm tempted!
> :)
>
>

try editing the file....

/usr/share/backgrounds/constantine/default/constantine.xml

and change the constantine.png to your own file in every instance of the
name constantine.png

just a thought

Martin

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Re: changing GDM background image on F12

2009-11-28T17:38:32Z

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 11:36:32AM +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-11-28 at 17:48 -0500, fred smith wrote:
> > I'd like to change the GDM (login) screen wallpaper
>
> You could try the brute force and ignorance method: Find the graphic
> currently used, and simply replace the picture file with your own.
>
> I did that with my laptop, since none of the "correct" ways to configure
> GDM had any effec. That was with Fedora 7 and 11, I haven't tried 12
> yet.

belive me, I'm tempted!
:)

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I can do all things through Christ
who strengthens me.
------------------------------ Philippians 4:13 -------------------------------

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Re: changing GDM background image on F12

2009-11-28T17:06:32Z

On Sat, 2009-11-28 at 17:48 -0500, fred smith wrote:
> I'd like to change the GDM (login) screen wallpaper

You could try the brute force and ignorance method: Find the graphic
currently used, and simply replace the picture file with your own.

I did that with my laptop, since none of the "correct" ways to configure
GDM had any effec. That was with Fedora 7 and 11, I haven't tried 12
yet.

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Re: ISo disck for fedora 12

2009-11-28T17:05:21Z

On 11/28/2009 04:36 PM, Alex Bahoor wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm trying to install fedora 12 on a laptop. I don'wloaded the image,
> however, not sure which part of the image must be burnt in as iso. can
> some one please send me a pointer?
> thx,
> Alex

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/installation-quick-start-guide/f12/en-US/html/Burn_the_image_file_to_CD.html

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ISo disck for fedora 12

2009-11-28T16:36:22Z

Hi,

I'm trying to install fedora 12 on a laptop. I don'wloaded the image, however, not sure which part of the image must be burnt in as iso. can some one please send me a pointer?

thx,

Alex

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Re: Setting up a VM to run an F12 guest on an XP host

2009-11-28T16:20:03Z

John,

With XP, you must have admin privilages to install any thing. Sometimes
users are given admin priv, then it should work.

Alex

----- Original Message -----
From: "john wendel" <jwendel10@...>
To: "For users of Fedora" <fedora-list@...>
Sent: Saturday, November 28, 2009 3:34 PM
Subject: Setting up a VM to run an F12 guest on an XP host

>
> I know very little about Windows, so I'm seeking your advice.
>
> I'd like to run F12 on an XP box (so I can get some work done), could
> someone point me to the right software. The big problem is that I don't
> have admin privs on the XP box so I can't install anything. Is it even
> possible?
>
> Thanks,
>
> John
>
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Re: expect command spawns incorrectly

2009-11-28T16:13:41Z

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 15:47, Steven W. Orr <steveo@...> wrote:

On 11/28/09 02:43, quoth Donald Russell:

> I am trying to use the expect program to automate an sftp process....
>
> The expect file begins with
>
> spawn sftp -oProxyCommand='....' user@host
> expect "password:"
> send "sesame\n"
> expect "sftp> "

Try this:

send "sesame\r"

I'll try that, but I'm not hopeful.

The command that is spawned fails... I get the "usage" as if all that was spawned was "sftp" and not the entire command. So it doesn't even get to the "expect password" part, regardless of whether I'm using \n or \r in the "send".

And I gather there is no such character on the "spawn" line... the command is just taken to be the literal characters up to the end-of-line.
Do I need to escape anything? As I mentioned, if I cut/past the command into a shell.. it works fine... it's just got being spawned properly by expect. (Or I'm doing something wrong :-( )

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Re: expect command spawns incorrectly

2009-11-28T15:47:59Z

On 11/28/09 02:43, quoth Donald Russell:
> I am trying to use the expect program to automate an sftp process....
>
> The expect file begins with
>
> spawn sftp -oProxyCommand='....' user@host
> expect "password:"
> send "sesame\n"
> expect "sftp> "

Try this:

send "sesame\r"

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happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0
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individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
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Re: How to get FlashPlayer working under 64bit/Fc11

2009-11-28T15:43:37Z

Thanks, whatever that group of commands did, they got flashplayer
running.

Next problem,- audio.

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Setting up a VM to run an F12 guest on an XP host

2009-11-28T15:34:28Z

I know very little about Windows, so I'm seeking your advice.

I'd like to run F12 on an XP box (so I can get some work done), could
someone point me to the right software. The big problem is that I don't
have admin privs on the XP box so I can't install anything. Is it even
possible?

Thanks,

John

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Re: TV tuner, sound etc. -- what does this mean?

2009-11-28T14:50:50Z

William Case wrote:

> Hi Michael;
>
> On Fri, 2009-07-31 at 07:54 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>> On Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:52:00 -0400, William wrote:
>>
>>> Mplayer gives me sound from both my DVD/CD drive (which RhythmBox fails
>>> to do) and video1 for tv (which tvtime fails to do).
>> It's not accurate to say "tvtime fails", because it doesn't even try to do
>> what you think it does [apparently]. The implementation in tvtime is
>> from 2005 and can only enable an analogue audio input channel.
>
> I have understood from the first time that you told me that tvtime does
> not mix sound -- except for the simplest kind of volume control; that
> ALSA is, or should be supplying the mixing.
>
> However, from a descriptive perspective, when I launch tvtime I get no
> sound. I don't think anybody on "God's Green Earth" would misunderstand
> what I am saying. What words would you suggest I choose to express that
> meaning?
>
> Getting mplayer working as a replacement for tvtime is not the point of
> this exercise. There is something clearly wrong with some drivers that
> are related to ALSA. My system's sound chips are not terribly unique.
> The whole world is going to the PCIe bus. Having a tuner that includes
> both analogue and digital is not something that should be difficult to
> overcome. As you point out, analogue is not being used. As you have
> also pointed out, this is not about tvtime but about enabling one of the
> under lying chips or drivers.
>

Enabling some chip to do what? There is no analog sound any more, you can't
"enable" it, you would have to write your own driver.

> Perhaps you can suggest another program that should be using alsa's
> analog sound capability (or lack of that capability) and I will try to
> get that going.
>
What you need is a program which can handle what the video driver writers choose
to make available (because that's useful to them) and has a usable user
interface I can give to a non-hacker. Unfortunately after almost two years of
looking I have concluded that video is now exclusively hacker land. Application
tell the user to do things in SQL, or to enter channel frequencies in MHz, and
there seems to be nothing which is user friendly, where you can select analog or
digital format (many cable systems have both), and a channel number, and have it
work without knowing how to "install the database software of choice and create
a user" or "build a table to frequencies in MHz and channel names" and other
things of interest only to hackers.

TV on Linux had a brief moment of working very easily, but it seems to have
vanished. If I'm trying to get someone to try Linux instead of Win7 I never
mention TV capability.

--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@...>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot

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Re: changing GDM background image on F12

2009-11-28T14:48:50Z

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 01:53:14PM -0500, Todd Zullinger wrote:

> Bill Davidsen wrote:
> > Could you explain a little more what you are trying to do?
> >
> > If you're just trying to change the wallpaper, what happens when you
> > just use the standard menu to do that? Or are you trying to do
> > something more?
> >
> > What behavior do you get when you (from memory)
> > system->preferences->appearance->background->add->{select a file}
> > and if by default you mean system wide, the [make default] button may help
>
> As the subject says, he's trying to change the background for the GDM
> screen. Since GDM doesn't provide a panel, there isn't really a
> convenient way to browse to system->preferences->appearance... :)
>
> Using gconftool-2 is generally the best way to achieve this, and works
> fine for me on F-12 (as it has in past releases). Why it's not
> working for Fred remains to be seen.

As Todd says, I'd like to change the GDM (login) screen wallpaper. I had
accidentally stumbled into that in F10, and never really knew how I
had done it (but liked the image it ended up with so I left it.)
but then my SSD went bad and when I got it back from repair I installed
F11 and never pursued this, but now that I've done an update to F12
I'd like to change the image again. I thought that choosing "make
default" in the tool Bill suggests would do it, but it doesn't.
so I've also tried the command (shown in earlier emails in this thread
but somehow purged from this one) using gconftool-2 and it didn't
work either.

i've put the image in /usr/share/backgrounds/images, but a lot of the
discussion I've seen of this just say "/usr/share/backgrunds", so is
it possible that it should not go in any of hte subdirs there? doesn't
seem to make sense, as I specified the full path to the file when I
ran gconftool-2.

--
---- Fred Smith -- fredex@... -----------------------------
"And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government there will be no end. He
will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding
it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever."
------------------------------- Isaiah 9:7 (niv) ------------------------------

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Re: Bug in /etc/cron.d/mlocate.cron or am I crazy?

2009-11-28T14:34:28Z

On 11/28/09 15:05, quoth Matthew Miller:
> On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 02:51:58PM -0500, Steven W. Orr wrote:
>> Yes, I agree that if I see that script hanging on a regular basis then I
>> will provide trace data to Bugzilla for further analysis. But this begs
>> two questions:
>
> It's pretty important to know where it's hanging. I don't think it's likely
> to be a bug in awk; therefore, I think it's probably likely you'll see the
> same thing with your version of the script.

We will see any day now. It happens pretty regularly. I could be wrong, I'm
betting that the problem is not related to being unsuccessful at looping in a
script and that it's more likely to be related to some child process cleanup
problem.

>> Either way, the original script is deficient because it does not properly
>> recognize fields 1 and 2.
>
> Again, only an issue if a filesystem type happens to be given the name
> "nodev" *and* isn't itself a nodev fs *and* shouldn't be excluded from
> updatedb anyway. So, that seems pretty academic, even though you're
> technically correct.

Now you've jinxed it! I'll betcha a buck that Murphy is subscribed to this
list and that's the next thing that's going to happen. It'll probably be a
feature of ZFS. ;-)

> Second, there's nothing performance-sensitive about this part of the script,
> so optimizing out an awk call at the expense of changing a simple one-liner
> to a half-page function doesn't seem like a win. So, updating the awk
> pattern to use either a regular expression or the same logic found in your
> function seems like the better change (if any is to be made at all).
>

I'm willing to work with this approach, but then the proper way to do it in
awk would be as follows:

nodevs=$(< /proc/filesystems awk -F '\t' '/^nodev/ && NF==2 { print $2 }')

I don't know if it's becoming obvious or not, but I'm starting to get (maybe
overly) sensitive about how well scripts are written compared to the higher
standards that are demanded in other languages. Is this an invalid social
observation?

>> Am I being too anal? Is it a doc problem? Is it a bug in mlocate that should
>> be fixed?

--
Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have .0.
happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0
Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- 000
individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
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Re: Trying to get Audio Working on F11

2009-11-28T13:22:50Z

Reg Clemens wrote:

> OK, I seem to have backed myself into a hole in the ground.
>
> I have recently installed F11.
> I noticed that sound was not playing on the few videos that would play from
> youtube (the rest of the videos are waiting for me to get flash working a
> separate problem).
>
> I tried aplay, me and root. Nothing.
> I removed pulseaudio with
> yum remove pulseaudio
> and now aplay could play sounds as root, but not me.
> I checked /dev/snd, and it is 660 root and audio.
> I changed that to 666 and I could play sounds as me.
> OK, back up, changed it back to 660, and added myself to the audio group.
> FOR SOME REASON this did now work. Mumph, no sound as me.
>
> OK, decided to back up again.
> Reinstalled pulseaudio, but was back to where I was to start with, no audio.
> Reremoved pulseaudio.
> But NOW I dont get sound with aplay under any conditions, not me, not root.
>
> So, I dont know where to go next.
> I currently have no sould from aplay, nomatter who the user.
>
> Things were so much simpler back before this pulseaudio thing came along.
>
> Mumph.
>
> Any thoughts on what I should try next, and please dont suggest
> reinstalling F11...
>
>

Have you tried only aplay? Would you consider trying another player

such as mplayer?

aplay is command-line sound recorder and player for ALSA soundcard
driver. I've had different levels of success with ALSA at times,
depending on the sound card in the machine as not all cards support ALSA
very well. When I've had problems I've had to resort to using alsactl
and alsa-info for help.

For example, I have one F11 system where mplayer works just fine...but
due to the hardware aplay only seems to output static. I didn't spend
any time to try getting it to work with aplay since mplayer works 100%.

--
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Everything is sometimes. Guess Who! http://tinyurl.com/mc4xe7

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Re: How to get FlashPlayer working under 64bit/Fc11

2009-11-28T13:20:32Z

2009/11/28 Reg Clemens <reg@...>:
> I have been testing with CNN news, which is the application I really
> want to use flash with. There, I get the above behaviour with all video
> clips. On youtube, mabe 1/2 or 1/3 of the video clips play, but the rest
> give the blue screen result. I will assume that the ones that play are
> something other than flash.

Do you have the necessary codecs installed? Flash is required for the
player, but you still need the codecs for the various kinds of
encodings used in the different videos. Also some of the websites like
CNN doesn't play well with Adblock Plus or similar plugins, is that
your case?

I would try running FF without any add-ons (safe mode) to test and
would try installing the proper codecs.

GL
--
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Open source is the future. It sets us free.

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Re: Setting up a VM to run XP in an up-to-date F12 box?

2009-11-28T12:13:37Z

On Saturday 28 November 2009 19:01:22 Sam Sharpe wrote:
> >> Additionally can you experts tell me whether you can use usbkeys in the
> >> VM,
> >
> > In order to have full support for USB you need to use the closed-source
> > VirtualBox from SUN
>
> Or... you can use KVM and Fedora's built-in Virt Manager. It does
> support USB and PCI device passthrough.

Or use VMWare, for that matter. :-)

> I'm not sure where this stuff about VirtualBox being more
> "user-friendly" comes from. Maybe I'm not the average user, but there
> are things I can do with libvirt in Fedora that make it very user
> friendly, but I don't think the same level of control is available in
> VirtualBox, so I would rate it as less user-friendly for me.

Well, that depends on typical usage scenario. If you are an admin who wants
command-line control of headless virtual servers running Linux, libvirt is
probably the best/most flexible choice. OTOH, if you are a novice user who
wants to virtualize XP and open Word files, you probably prefer an easy GUI
with a clever setup wizard and point-and-click configuration options, and you
want it to Just Work, with pink flowers and butterflies drawn all around. :-)

It all depends on one's definition of "user friendly" --- user friendly as in
"simple enough" or user friendly as in "powerful enough". Like Windows and
Linux, VLC and mplayer, postfix and sendmail, Gnome and KDE, Notepad and
Emacs... ;-)

> My advice would be to try using Virt-Manager in Fedora (providing you
> have recent hardware) and see how you get on. It really really isn't
> that difficult. If it's not working for you, then investigate
> VirtualBox or even VMWare Player.

Well, I tried them all, albeit not in that order. I entered virtualization
world with VMWare, several years ago, and eventually got pissed off with
frequent module breakage. Then I tried QEMU, both from command line and from
the GUI, and it looked promising up to the point when kernel modules were
discontinued. And it didn't have all that fancy stuff like copy/paste, guest
resolution flexibility and that "unity"/"seamless" guest GUI integration. After
I found out that my hardware is not good enough, I tried VirtualBox, and it
had it all --- practically the same as VMWare in user experience, while having
stable support for kernel modules.

So since then I recommend VirtualBox for regular desktop and mixed OS usage.
Of course, if you want virtualized Linux servers on a Linux host and have good
hardware, KVM is the way to go, or maybe even Xen. But for using an XP guest
inside a Fedora host, Virt-Manager is definitely "rough around the edges"
compared to both VMWare and VirtualBox. I would always recommend to a newbie
to try one of those two first.

At least that is my experience. But the nice thing is that you can use all of
them if you like, Linux is all about choice. Each to his own. :-)

Best, :-)
Marko

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Re: Bug in /etc/cron.d/mlocate.cron or am I crazy?

2009-11-28T12:05:46Z

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 02:51:58PM -0500, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> Yes, I agree that if I see that script hanging on a regular basis then I
> will provide trace data to Bugzilla for further analysis. But this begs
> two questions:

It's pretty important to know where it's hanging. I don't think it's likely
to be a bug in awk; therefore, I think it's probably likely you'll see the
same thing with your version of the script.

> Either way, the original script is deficient because it does not properly
> recognize fields 1 and 2.

Again, only an issue if a filesystem type happens to be given the name
"nodev" *and* isn't itself a nodev fs *and* shouldn't be excluded from
updatedb anyway. So, that seems pretty academic, even though you're
technically correct.

Second, there's nothing performance-sensitive about this part of the script,
so optimizing out an awk call at the expense of changing a simple one-liner
to a half-page function doesn't seem like a win. So, updating the awk
pattern to use either a regular expression or the same logic found in your
function seems like the better change (if any is to be made at all).

>
> Am I being too anal? Is it a doc problem? Is it a bug in mlocate that should
> be fixed?
>
> --
> Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have .0.
> happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0
> Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- 000
> individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
> steveo at syslang.net
>

> --
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--
Matthew Miller <mattdm@...>
Senior Systems Architect
Cyberinfrastructure Labs / Instructional & Research Computing
Computing & Information Technology
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences

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Re: Bug in /etc/cron.d/mlocate.cron or am I crazy?

2009-11-28T11:51:58Z

On 11/28/09 03:53, quoth Michael Schwendt:

> On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:20:23 -0500, Matthew wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 10:55:17PM -0500, Steven W. Orr wrote:
>>> I can't believe this is a real bug. I'm submit it to bugzilla. It's in F10, 11
>>> and 12. I'd be curious to know just how old this bug is.
>>> Contents of mlocate.cron is:
>>> #!/bin/sh
>>> nodevs=$(< /proc/filesystems awk '$1 == "nodev" { print $2 }')
>> [...]
>>> Unless I'm going cuckoo, I'm guessing that the intent was for line two to be:
>>> nodevs=$(< /proc/filesystems | awk '$1 == "nodev" { print $2 }')
>> Have you tried it? The code in the file isn't an error; it's just very
>> obscure bash syntax. That is, $(< /some/file ) is obscure, and $(<
>> /some/file filter-command ) is *really* obscure. Doesn't seem to be
>> documented in the bash manual -- but it works.
>
> See first chapter of topic "REDIRECTION" in bash manual.
>
>> And putting a | in the middle there doesn't.
>
> That would only work as expected when also replacing "<" with "cat".
>

I am very interested in this question on multiple levels.

Let's start at the first level:

foo=$(< fn bar)

apparently is functionally equivalent to

foo=$( bar < fn )

which really is quite different from

foo=$(cat fn | bar)

which actually runs at least two child processes.

I do *not* see anything in the bash man page, either in the description for
$(< ) which says that it is functionally equivalent to using cat, but does not
explain anything about pipes being illegal in this context. I also do not see
anything of relevance to this topic in the bash man page on REDIRECTION. At
best, the man page is deficient in that it *should* say that the syntax
defaults to qq=$(0< filename) and that other values besides zero are supported.

For example,
qq=$(3< /etc/passwd 0<&3 cat)
actually works.

The other question which seems so obvious to me is the question of how
mlocate.cron should be fixed.

Yes, I agree that if I see that script hanging on a regular basis then I will
provide trace data to Bugzilla for further analysis. But this begs two questions:

1. Should the scripts be written in sh or should we be allowed to use bash
constructs, in this case, like BASH_REMATCH and =~.

2. Even though the solution is a bit longer, is that justification for doing
it the way it's done instead of doing it correctly?

My first proposal:
*********start*************
#!/bin/bash
get_nodevs()
{
# Return ret as a global
while read line # Read each line from /proc/filesystems
do
if [[ "$line" =~ $'^nodev\t(.*)$' ]] # Do a real regex
then
(( ${#BASH_REMATCH[@]} == 2 )) && ret="$ret ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
fi
done < /proc/filesystems
ret=${ret:1} # Lop off the leading space.
}
ret='' # ret is global used to return value from get_nodevs
get_nodevs
nodevs="$ret"
{
renice +19 -p $$
ionice -c2 -n7 -p $$
| > /dev/null 2>&1
/usr/bin/updatedb -f "$nodevs"
**********end**************

could be correctly implemented in Bourne shell without using any bashisms by
replacing get_nodevs with this:
get_nodevs()
{
# Return ret as a global
old_IFS="$IFS"
IFS=' ' # There's a TAB in there
while read line # Read each line from /proc/filesystems
do
set -- $line
[[ $# -eq 2 && "$1" = nodev ]] && ret="$ret $2"
done < /proc/filesystems
IFS="$old_IFS"
}

Either way, the original script is deficient because it does not properly
recognize fields 1 and 2.

Am I being too anal? Is it a doc problem? Is it a bug in mlocate that should
be fixed?

--
Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have .0.
happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0
Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- 000
individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
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Re: How to get FlashPlayer working under 64bit/Fc11

2009-11-28T11:27:01Z

On Saturday 28 November 2009 17:22:05 Reg Clemens wrote:
> > On Saturday 28 November 2009 08:26:51 Reg Clemens wrote:
> > > Can someone PLEASE give me detailed instructions on how to get
> > > flash-player working on this machine, or point me as some (working)
> > > instructions on the web.
> >
> > http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_64bit.html
> >
> Instead of getting a screen telling me to load flash-player, I just get
> an empty light-blue screen, and nothing happens.

I've never experienced anything remotely similar to an empty light-blue screen
in firefox. It reminds me of a bad setup of direct rendering in graphics
drivers, though. Like mplayer displaying a blue screen instead of a movie or
such. But nothing like that in a *browser*, ever.

> I have been testing with CNN news, which is the application I really
> want to use flash with. There, I get the above behaviour with all video
> clips. On youtube, mabe 1/2 or 1/3 of the video clips play, but the rest
> give the blue screen result. I will assume that the ones that play are
> something other than flash.

I don't watch CNN news, but I fired it up now just to check my flash. Everything
seems to work, all clips and news, CNN Live streaming, etc... Live streaming
is a bit jerky, but I guess that's just because of the bandwidth and such.

Every clip on youtube that I tried works.

This bluescreen stuff is suspicious. What graphics card do you use? Drivers? Do
you have working 2D, 3D, xv in mplayer and such? Any issues with those?

> Any further thoughts on what I may have missed?

Try to use a different browser to test&compare? Konqueror, opera, or such?
Point them to the same flash plugin .so and try them out instead?

Or "yum remove firefox" followed by "yum install firefox" followed by
reinstalling the .so ?

Or create a new dummy user, log in and try it from there?

Btw, I'm on F12, 64bit. Maybe upgrade? Though firefox is the same version, I
guess it shouldn't matter...

HTH, :-)
Marko

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Re: Setting up a VM to run XP in an up-to-date F12 box?

2009-11-28T11:01:22Z

>> Additionally can you experts tell me whether you can use usbkeys in the VM,
>
> In order to have full support for USB you need to use the closed-source
> VirtualBox from SUN

Or... you can use KVM and Fedora's built-in Virt Manager. It does
support USB and PCI device passthrough.

I'm not sure where this stuff about VirtualBox being more
"user-friendly" comes from. Maybe I'm not the average user, but there
are things I can do with libvirt in Fedora that make it very user
friendly, but I don't think the same level of control is available in
VirtualBox, so I would rate it as less user-friendly for me.

e.g. I have some RHEL and CentOS VMs, they're for development. I don't
run them all the time, they don't have a GUI. If I want them on, I can
do:

# virsh start RHEL1
# virsh console RHEL1
<do whatever I need>
# virsh shutdown RHEL1

My advice would be to try using Virt-Manager in Fedora (providing you
have recent hardware) and see how you get on. It really really isn't
that difficult. If it's not working for you, then investigate
VirtualBox or even VMWare Player.

--
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firefox repeatedly crashes while trying to save bookmark

2009-11-28T10:59:05Z

I start firefox (64bit) with one tab pointed at start.fedoraproject.com

I try to save a bookmark to this page by bringing up the bookmark this page dialog from the menubar. I click on the "show all bookmarks folders" arrow and I get a dialog box showing all my bookmarks and bookmark folders. I start to scroll down the list and when I get about 3/4ths down the page firefox crashes. This has occurred every time I have tried it. I'm running latest FF on 64bit F12. Anyone else experienced this?

Paolo

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Re: changing GDM background image on F12

2009-11-28T10:53:14Z

Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Could you explain a little more what you are trying to do?
>
> If you're just trying to change the wallpaper, what happens when you
> just use the standard menu to do that? Or are you trying to do
> something more?
>
> What behavior do you get when you (from memory)
> system->preferences->appearance->background->add->{select a file}
> and if by default you mean system wide, the [make default] button may help

As the subject says, he's trying to change the background for the GDM
screen. Since GDM doesn't provide a panel, there isn't really a
convenient way to browse to system->preferences->appearance... :)

Using gconftool-2 is generally the best way to achieve this, and works
fine for me on F-12 (as it has in past releases). Why it's not
working for Fred remains to be seen.

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When you make a mistake, make amends immediately. It's easier to eat
crow while it's still warm.

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Re: Setting up a VM to run XP in an up-to-date F12 box?

2009-11-28T10:43:33Z

On Saturday 28 November 2009 14:49:44 Mike Cloaked wrote:
> Interesting replies - thank you - but noticeable that the fedora provided
> facility of kvm has been mentioned by no-one!

As others can say, it requires appropriate hardware, and is a bit rough on the
edges. Other than that, the user interface for setting up a VM is not as user-
friendly as the one in VirtualBox, hence my suggestion to use the latter,
especially if you are a newbie to this.

> Additionally can you experts tell me whether you can use usbkeys in the VM,

In order to have full support for USB you need to use the closed-source
VirtualBox from SUN (they have their own yum repo that serves it, look up on
www.virtualbox.org). The difference between the closed and open source version
is minimal, and consists mainly in support for USB and remote-desktop
facility. In other words, install the SUN closed source version, and you have
USB.

> and also whether or not there is communication out of the VM onto the
> network interface?

Of course there is :-) . This is a bit complicated subject, there are four
conceptually different ways of setting up networking for the virtual machine.
Setting any of them up amounts just to an appropriate click in the wizard, but
you need to understand how each functions and decide which is best for you.
Only one can be set up for a given VM. They are as follows (N.B. I don't know
exact names, I'm writing this from memory):

1) "Bridged network" --- your VM will have an independent network device which
is "connected" to your ISP directly, on equal footing as your host computer
(in reality the same cable/wireless is used, but that is not important). The
upside is that it gets to use DHCP and all in the same way as provided to you
by your ISP (or router, or whatever you are actually connected to). The guest
is visible from the Internet as much as your host machine is. The Internet is
visible from the guest as much as it is from the host. The downside is that
all communication between your host and guest machines goes through that
router: from your VM through host cable to the router and back through host
cable to the host network card. This can be a bit inefficient if you have a slow
connection and want to transfer inordinate amount of data between host and
guest. You can also catch a virus/worm/whatever from the Internet if your
guest does not have a proper firewall and stuff.

2) "Virtual NAT" --- your host will be provided with an additional virtual
ethernet device, connected to a virtual switch which is connected to the
guest. Imagine that you have two boxes and a switch --- both are connected to
each other through a switch, and one (the host) is connected to your ISP with
another eth card. That is the setup. The virtual switch provides DHCP for both
host and guest (it is automatically set up to not interfere with your ISP's
DHCP), sets up host as the guest's gateway and all. The upside is that you
have a 1GBit connection between host and guest, regardless of any physical
network. The guest is visible only from the host, not from the Internet, while
Internet is visible from both (IOW, the virtual switch provides NAT for
guest). You cannot catch a virus by just being connected, you need to do
something stupid yourself (such as visiting suspicious websites with Internet
Explorer or such). I recommend this for simple home use.

3) "Host-only network" --- same setup as virtual NAT, just guest is not
allowed to access the Internet. It can see only the host, nothing else.

4) "No networking" --- obvious.

Since you are a first-timer, go with virtual NAT, and don't worry about
anything. :-)

> Another point I am interested in is whether it is possible to drop a file
> using the desktop file manager gui from Fedora into the XP VM window and
> open the file in an app within the XP VM?

I'm not sure about drag&drop, as I never use it (even in Linux itself). What
you can surely do is to save the file into a shared folder and then drag&drop
it from within the VM. It can amount to total of two drag&drops: one on the
host (to get the file from the attachment into a shared folder) and one on the
guest (to get the file from the shared folder into an app). File sharing is
done via samba, you get the "Network Neighborhood" and all that in XP for the
virtual network. It is not on by default, you need to set it up (this was
mentioned in the thread).

There is also one very useful thing --- copy/paste mechanism works across
host/guests, albeit only for text-only contents AFAIK. Copy text here, paste
it there, as if on the same machine. This becomes available (along with many
other things) once you install "guest additions", custom drivers for the guest
that make life better and easier. :-)

> I'd like to know what the limits are for using the VM before going down the
> road of setting it all up.

Imagine two computers connected in a LAN. Anything that you can do with those,
you can do in virtualized environment. In addition to that, you have some
flexibility that is impossible to have with two physical computers:

* ability to copy/paste across hosts/guests
* ability to share same set of speakers and the same display
* ability to have custom desktop resolution on guest in order to fit the
geometry of the host's window that displays it
* ability called "seamless mode", where windows from both host and guest are
displayed in host's window manager --- the guest doesn't have its own
"desktop", but shares it with the host; very very neat thing
* ability to use only as much actual disk space as really needed by VM --- the
virtual hard-disk is nominally say 10GB, but the actual file containing it is
only as large as the total data written on that disk by the guest, so no free
space is wasted --- the file just grows as the guest writes data to the disk
* ability to add/remove hardware parts on the guest without a screwdriver and
getting hands dirty
* probably even more...

> Additionally if anyone has used kvm how does qemu feature in this scheme -
> is it needed at all for running an XP VM?

QEMU is the actual emulator engine which is used in conjunction with KVM to
provide virtualization. That is what you are running if you use Fedora's
virtmanager. VirtualBox doesn't use it, it has its own emulator.

> I can see that VirtualBox is recommended by people who have used it but I
> would like to be able to compare VirtualBox with KVM in terms of not only
> ease of setting up, but also performance and usability once it is set up.

For normal desktop usage (opening files in Word and such) performance between
VB and KVM is practically identical, provided the appropriate hardware for
KVM. If your hardware does not support virtualization, QEMU will work in all-
software emulation which is *terribly* slow, while VB has a kernel module
which gives almost equal performance as if you had hardware support. QEMU did
have such a kernel module up to some time ago, but support for it was dropped
due to conflicting with support for KVM. That's when most users who do not have
appropriate hardware dropped KVM/QEMU and went for VirtualBox.

Note also that KVM/VB user experience is mostly identical to running XP
natively on hardware, if you give it at least 512 MB of RAM. The performance
decreases substantially for processor-intensive operations (math calculations,
video production, virus scanning, etc.), but you should not use a virtual
machine for those things in the first place. If you decide to face the Internet
with a VM, you'll probably install some virus scanner, and that will be the
biggest hog on the machine. Most of the other things are smooth.

I suggest that you go to www.virtualbox.org and read all the docs available,
you'll learn all that you want to know, and find out even more. Then try out
one XP install just for fun, and see how it goes for you. Just remember to
install guest additions once XP is up, since without it the desktop
performance will be quite poor.

Finally, in addition to VirtualBox and KVM/QEMU, there is also VMWare.
However, it is proprietary and kernel modules break often due to frequent
kernel upgrades in Fedora. Therefore I don't recommend it for usage within
Fedora. OTOH, it does provide the best hardware support for the guest --- you
can connect to the guest practically anything available on the host --- usb,
webcams, bluetooth, FireWire, various card readers, and all that...

HTH, :-)
Marko

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Trying to get Audio Working on F11

2009-11-28T10:26:23Z

OK, I seem to have backed myself into a hole in the ground.

I have recently installed F11.
I noticed that sound was not playing on the few videos that would play from
youtube (the rest of the videos are waiting for me to get flash working a
separate problem).

I tried aplay, me and root. Nothing.
I removed pulseaudio with
yum remove pulseaudio
and now aplay could play sounds as root, but not me.
I checked /dev/snd, and it is 660 root and audio.
I changed that to 666 and I could play sounds as me.
OK, back up, changed it back to 660, and added myself to the audio group.
FOR SOME REASON this did now work. Mumph, no sound as me.

OK, decided to back up again.
Reinstalled pulseaudio, but was back to where I was to start with, no audio.
Reremoved pulseaudio.
But NOW I dont get sound with aplay under any conditions, not me, not root.

So, I dont know where to go next.
I currently have no sould from aplay, nomatter who the user.

Things were so much simpler back before this pulseaudio thing came along.

Mumph.

Any thoughts on what I should try next, and please dont suggest
reinstalling F11...

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Reg.Clemens
reg@...

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