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initrd, lilo and general weirdness
by Ricardo Campos 05 Jun '02

05 Jun '02

1st off: Adam:- for some bizarre reason, my box booted into 2.4.18 this morning, even though 3 reboots still took it to 2.2.19 last night. I simply have no idea why. One question: why do people seem to dislike initrd.img's? I'm gonna have to compile a kernel anyway cos I got all sorts of unresolved symbols, and some of the modules I'd prefer to have compiled in anyway. For some reason, lilo won't let me boot to my second disk. I have a second HD, with a copy of lilo on it (from previous installation). I would like the lilo on hda1 to boot onto hdb1, but for some reason it won't let me do this this morning (it just ignores me-no errors!) my lilo.conf line for it is: other=/dev/hdb1 label=Redhat alias=2 -General Weirdness Section- Last night, running on my old kernel, I copied the kernel source from a CD to my HD. While it did this my Xserver hung up until it had finished. The same happened when I un-bzipped it. grrr. Adam suggested it might be a h/w problem, so I booted into RH (which can't do *now*, grrr), and quite happily copied 4gigs from one directory to another, whilst mucking about with xmms, no lock up. Copied the kernel source from CD to ~/ and that was fine, unpacked it, fine. Anyone else experience this? -- Get your free email from www.linuxmail.org Powered by Outblaze

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Re: [Alug] Partition dilemma!
by Ricardo Campos 04 Jun '02

04 Jun '02

> > cp -a > > .... > > looks deceptively easy! :-/ > > well, it appears it *is* that easy. I ended up changing the locations of /home and /usr and the swap, and now I have loadsa space.I will have to have 12 gigs of data in /usr before I run out of space again! Thanks to all who helped! -- Get your free email from www.linuxmail.org Powered by Outblaze

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software for install day
by Adam Bower 03 Jun '02

03 Jun '02

Hi people, Something just struck me, do you guys have all the software you want for install day? I don't know if i am going to make it and I am sure you will have lots of lovely bandwidth at UEA etc. but are there any special requests? If so i can get downloading now and stick things on CD and post them to someone who will be there... Adam -- Adam Bower "a funny thing about regret is, that it's better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done"

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X server oddity - NVidia drivers installed
by Alexis Lee 03 Jun '02

03 Jun '02

Hi, Ever since I installed the NVidia binary drivers, the X server has flickered for about 10 seconds when it starts up. It looks like it's having to try more than once. (WW) System lacks support for changing MTRRs (WW) NVIDIA(0): Failure reading EDID parameters for display device 0. These are the only warnings I get. I tried to catch /var/log/XFree86.0.log, but although I'd estimate the server only restarts every second or so, the amount of time the XF*log is complete is a tiny fraction of a second, so that isn't too useful. Any ideas? Alexis -- "You got what everyone gets. A lifetime." - Death (Sandman by Neil Gaiman) Why isn't there an information line to ask when your lucky day is scheduled? "I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education" - Wilson Mizner

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 03 Jun '02

03 Jun '02

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.openprojects.net in the #alug channel, you can take a look at www.openprojects.net to get more info on the openprojects network. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server uk.openprojects.net" or "/server eu.openprojects.net" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include tkirc, bitchx, xchat and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://freshmeat.net/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Re: [Alug] Partition dilemma!
by Ricardo Campos 02 Jun '02

02 Jun '02

>.. Hard disk upgrade howto will help tho. cp -a .... looks deceptively easy! :-/ Thanks! Ricardo -- Get your free email from www.linuxmail.org Powered by Outblaze

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Partition dilemma!
by Ricardo Campos 02 Jun '02

02 Jun '02

I'm running out of space on my /usr partition. What I would like to do is temporarily move /usr to the partition where / lives (I made / a bit too big, and /usr too little). Then resize the /usr partition.Then mount /usr back to the /usr partition. i.e. Currently: hda1 / hda6 /usr Then: hda1 / (cfdisk shenanigans to increase size of hda6) Then back to: hda1 / hda6 /usr However, as /usr contains most my programs, I am unsure as to how to do it. My plan is to boot into a rescue disk (or would single user mode and a normal boot work? if I unmount /usr), change /etc/fstab (to not mount the /usr partition), make a dir called /usr on the root partition, copy the contents of the /usr partition to the /usr on the root partition. Reboot to check, then back into the rescue disk, cfdisk to enlargen the partition formerly known as /usr, mke2fs to create the file system,copy /usr on the root partition to the new one, change the /etc/fstab to mount the new /usr, and reboot. I'm a little concerned in case permissions change... but does that sound right? Am I missing anything? TIA Ricardo -- Get your free email from www.linuxmail.org Powered by Outblaze

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Re: [Alug] Partition dilemma!
by Ricardo Campos 02 Jun '02

02 Jun '02

-snip- > > cd /mnt/usr > find . -xdev -depth | cpio -padlm --sparse /usr -snip- hmmm... I'll have a rethink. I don't like using commands I don't really understand, since I can't fix 'em if something goes wrong. I don't really understand the cpio -p switch or --sparse. (after RTFM) Also, I am not too well up on hard links, I know about softlinks (ln -s)- how can I tell if a file is a hard link? what makes this doubly dangerous, is that I'm doing this because I presently have 2 linux systems on the same box.Due to previous OS's being there, I had to do a lot of jiggery pokery i.e. red hat has /usr on hda, but / on hdb. But as Red Hat is only on there as legacy (while I work out why my debian doesn't play DVD's very well)I want to move Redhat's /usr to it's root partition,and use that space for debian's /usr. *ick* I'm gonna chown Redhat's /home/ partition, that's pretty easy, and the permissions are easypeasy on that too. <gulp> -- Get your free email from www.linuxmail.org Powered by Outblaze

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Re: [Alug] Partition dilemma!
by Steve Fosdick 02 Jun '02

02 Jun '02

On Sun, 02 Jun 2002 11:40:07 Ricardo Campos wrote: > However, as /usr contains most my programs, I am > unsure as to how to do it. > > My plan is to boot into a rescue disk (or would single > user mode and a normal boot work? if I unmount /usr), > change /etc/fstab (to not mount the /usr partition), > make a dir called /usr on the root partition, copy the > contents of the /usr partition to the /usr on the > root partition. Reboot to check, then back into the > rescue disk, cfdisk to enlargen the partition formerly > known as /usr, mke2fs to create the file system,copy > /usr on the root partition to the new one, change the > /etc/fstab to mount the new /usr, and reboot. I would certainly make sure of having a recsue disc available just in case this goes wrong, but you can do most of the work from the main system. Here's how I would so it (use at your own risk): 1. Shutdown to single user mode. 2. Mount the old /usr partition to another directory, e.g. /mnt/usr. 3. Make the permissions of the /usr empty mount point directory match those of the mounted /usr partition, i.e. what you see when running ls -l /mnt/usr. 4. Copy the contents of the old /usr partition to the new directory. Ideally you want to preserve: a. permissions. b. times. c. links d. sparese files. Hopefully the following commands would do this: cd /mnt/usr find . -xdev -depth | cpio -padlm --sparse /usr I haven't tried this sequence under Linux, i.e. with GNU cpio so it would be good to test this with a small subset, i.e. create a small set of files some of which have hard links to each other and try copying them so see if the links, modification times and ownership all survive. Another possibility would be tar: cd /mnt tar cf - --atime-preserve -l -p --same-owner -S usr | (cd /; tar xf - --atime-preserve -l -p --same-owner -S) but again I would check that everything gets preserved correctly by running it on a test set of files first. The obvious answer of course is 'cp -a' but that doesn't preserve links. 5. Edit /etc/fstab so the system doesn't mount /usr. 6. Reboot the system and check that is still works. 7. Re-partition the disk - this may require another reboot depending on whether the kernel can be made to re-read the partition table. 8. Make the new filesystem on the larger partition. 9. Mount the new partition to another directory, e.g. /mnt/usr again. 10. Use the same copy command sequence but in reverse to copy the files back to the new partition. 11. Update /etc/fstab again (to refer to /usr and not /mnt/usr). 12. Rename the current /usr (i.e. the files actually on the root partition to something else, e.g. old_usr and create a new mount point directory (suggest owned by root, perms 555). 12. Reboot to check. 13. If all is OK then you can rm -rf the old_usr directory. It would be interesting to find your experiences of how well the command sequences to copy a filesystem preserving just about everything actually work, plus any other interesting things along the way. Steve.

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xdm
by Ricardo Campos 01 Jun '02

01 Jun '02

This is probably really simple.... I wish to display an .xpm in the background of xdm. I put in the line: xpmroot /graphics/front.xpm in my /etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0 file, but to no avail, it doesn't display it. Is the howto I have out of date, or am I missing something? My default display is 1024x768, and the xpm is that large... could it be anything else? (The file is chmod 666'd) Ricardo (Finally got his debian testing box all hunky-dory!) -- Get your free email from www.linuxmail.org Powered by Outblaze

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