From: Digestifier To: Linux-Activists@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu Reply-To: Linux-Activists@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu Date: Sat, 14 Aug 93 17:13:08 EDT Subject: Linux-Activists Digest #115 Linux-Activists Digest #115, Volume #6 Sat, 14 Aug 93 17:13:08 EDT Contents: Re: 57600 baud on Linux??? (Clayton Haapala) Re: Does linux work with 1542c BIOS enabled? (Philippe Steindl) Need Denver Area LINUX Contacts (Stephen J. Hennessy) fvwm problem with X1.3 (Byron A Jeff) Re: SLS 1.03 --- During the install, it asks for disk S2? What's up? (Geoffrey Hart) Re: Directory Manager -- Forth coming (David Fox) Re: where is dump? (David Fox) re: why would I want to run linux (David Fox) Xfree bug in Linux, or hardware problem??? (The Cybard) Re: mkdir says "no space left on device" and more problems... (Matthias Urlichs) Re: DOS FDISK trashed my partition table, can I save my Linux on /de (Matthias Urlichs) Re: Is 3c509 driver there yet? (Cameron L. Spitzer) Re: More annoyance on the DMA problem (Adam David) traceroute and dig available? (Jan Richert) Re: Ncurses, how do I... (Zeyd M. Ben-Halim) Re: Who is in charge of curses? (Zeyd M. Ben-Halim) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: clay@haapi.mn.org (Clayton Haapala) Subject: Re: 57600 baud on Linux??? Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 14:59:41 GMT In article <6747@sixhub.UUCP> davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen) writes: > The drivers for some UNIX systems use slow baud rates remapped, so you >still have the regular high speeds. In particular 50=>56k, 75=>76.8k. I >find that pretty easy to remember ;-) > Though the 38400 swap-out works fine, I'd rather keep the real 38400 and use a low one instead. I mean, I still have a Radio Shack modem that speaks only 110 baud, but it isn't seeing regular use, shall we say. :-) -- Clay Haapala "Well, there was the process of sitting around clay@haapi.mn.org and wishing I had more computer stuff." -- Dilbert ------------------------------ From: ilg@imp.ch (Philippe Steindl) Subject: Re: Does linux work with 1542c BIOS enabled? Date: 14 Aug 1993 20:09:56 +0200 Hello, I had the same problem. T solve it: just disable the three options in the Adaptecs BIOS that give you a warning when enabling them. I am using it together with an 1.5 GB disk and I don't have any problems without the < 1GB option enabled. cu Philippe ------------------------------ From: hennessy@teal.csn.org (Stephen J. Hennessy) Subject: Need Denver Area LINUX Contacts Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 18:15:07 GMT I'd like to make contact with Denver/Boulder Area LINUX users to form a Local LINUX users group and to share distribution costs on the SLS LINUX Floppy distribution. Steve Hennessy hennessy@csn.org (303) 698-9885 (303) 977-6541 (days) ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.help From: byron@cc.gatech.edu (Byron A Jeff) Subject: fvwm problem with X1.3 Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 18:20:09 GMT I'm trying to get fvwm 0.94 (and 0.93 for that matter) to run on my machine. The setup: Kernel: 0.99pl8-3 from SLS 1.01 distribution Patches: selection 1.4, ipcdelta, mmap X: 1.3 XF86_Mono Libs: 4.4.1 Machine: 40 Mhz 386. ET3000 card. 4 Meg ram. 120 Meg IDE HD fvwm 0.92 run fine under X1.2. But since I've swapped up to X1.3 I have not gotton anything to run. twm works fine. This is the message I get: fvwm: can't open display ":0" I just pulled down 0.94 from sunsite's linux Incoming directory. I used the no options binary and I compiled the binary myself from the sources. No Luck. Any suggestions? BAJ --- Another random extraction from the mental bit stream of... Byron A. Jeff - PhD student operating in parallel! Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332 Internet: byron@cc.gatech.edu ------------------------------ From: ghart@empros.com (Geoffrey Hart) Subject: Re: SLS 1.03 --- During the install, it asks for disk S2? What's up? Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 17:35:28 GMT Reply-To: ghart@empros.com The s1/install.end file is 0 bytes long (at least the copy I just ftp'd from tsx-11 was). When you downloaded this file, perhaps it didn't make it? My rz choked on it. So I did "cp t3/install.end s1" and things were good. -- geoff hart ghart@empros.com news@empros.com library@empros.com x4273 ------------------------------ From: dfox@hip-hop.suvl.ca.us (David Fox) Subject: Re: Directory Manager -- Forth coming Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 16:56:57 GMT I was just wondering: how does this DIRMAN compare to something like utree? -- David E. Fox email: hip-hop!dfox@amdahl.com 5479 Castle Manor Drive San Jose, CA 95129 Thanks for letting me change the magnetic 408/ 253-7992 images on your hard drive. ------------------------------ From: dfox@hip-hop.suvl.ca.us (David Fox) Subject: Re: where is dump? Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 17:06:14 GMT Bernard Johnson (hbj@engr.engr.uark.edu) wrote: : Has anyone written a dump/restore suite for linux? dump/restore is so : much nicer to use than tar for backups... It potentially is nicer, but I did give dump a try when running 386BSD (it was the first thing I tried for backing the system) but it proved unusable, because it spawns a new child task for each floppy. It worked OK for a while, but when it got to about disk 15 or so, the system was beginning to thrash. :( Also I don't really see the distinction between different dump levels in the dump utility (perhaps one can elaborate on this) - I see two different backup stategies, namely a full backup, and an incremental one, which is easily derivable from (for example) touching a file in /etc after the full backup, and using find -newer to get filenames modified since the last full backup. : Bernard Johnson : hbj@engr.engr.uark.edu -- David E. Fox email: hip-hop!dfox@amdahl.com 5479 Castle Manor Drive San Jose, CA 95129 Thanks for letting me change the magnetic 408/ 253-7992 images on your hard drive. ------------------------------ From: dfox@hip-hop.suvl.ca.us (David Fox) Subject: re: why would I want to run linux Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 17:46:29 GMT rozum@hpmtay.hp.lvld.com writes: >I have a simple question to all those who use LINUX. I got a bounce from that address, so I'll post. > *** Why should I want to use LINUX? ** >Before you start flaming me with "If you need to ask the question then >you don't need LINUX" please tell me the applications you are using it for. >I know that LINUX is UNIX operating system for PC's, but unfortunately >it can't run my DOS base programs (i.e., Borland C++ compilier, Amipro, >games, Mktools, etc...). As a former user of DOS, and a current user of Linux (and for about ten months or so, a user of 386BSD, which is another alternative for a free Unix-like OS) perhaps I can add something to the messages you've already gotten. I've run DOS for years, but for sometime have really wanted to use Unix instead. When the Intel 80386 came out, I figured it might be a decent platform for it. Finally I was able to purchase a modest 386(SX) system, and considered some versions of Unix (commercial ones) but they were much too expensive. Then I found out about Linux and 386BSD. FWIW, I put 386BSD on first because at the time it was easier for me to obtain (thanks to an 'installation party' at a local PC/Unix user meeting). Mostly the reasons for running Unix as opposed to DOS are because it can do multiuser/multitasking, has virtual memory, and there are literally hundreds of utilities and useful programs that form part of the base operating system. If you wanted similar utilities for DOS, you'd have to go looking for each one separately. I did use Desqview and Windows on the 386, prior to using Unix, and it was sort of OK, but as a user of Turbo C and MSC for DOS, I wanted to get it to handle some of the more advanced hardware features of a 386 processor. (After all, I did pay for it, and I might as well get to use it). Sometime later I was able to get the GNU compiler for DOS (the DJ Delorie port) but it didn't work well, and in particular I couldn't get the math emulator to work at all (at the time, I didn't have a coprocessor, but I've got a Cyrix one now), and it wouldn't run with QEMM installed, so I had to boot up from a special floppy. Speaking of Desqview, I wanted to add something. DV has extremely primitive task-switching capabilities compared to Linux. DV also has to add multitasking on top of a single-tasking OS, whereas Linux is built from the ground up to do that. For example, in DV I don't have very much control over priorities - each application gets interrupted every 18 times a second, and about all you can control is the priority of background vs. foreground tasks. In Linux (and on Unix systems in general) you can control priorities in a variety of ways, and the system is set up to dynamically adjust priorities based on need. As a result, I can do things like ray tracing in the background, and still use the system in the foreground or on another virtual (or real) terminal - something that would be difficult to accomplish on DOS. I did try this under DV, and the foreground response time was so slow as to be unusable. Also, I began to notice that increasingly things wouldn't work with my DOS configuration, and I ended up having to do lots of adjustments to config.sys and autoexec.bat (as well as the windows stuff) in order to get a program to run well. Linux, while possibly more difficult to use in other areas, makes this no longer an issue. Also since I got 4 megs of RAM, I'd like to use them _directly_ (in the so-called 'flat' mode) rather than getting at them with EMS, XMS, Extended, DPMI, VCPI, or any other kludge that people come up with to get at it. Since Linux has its own GCC (featuring not only C and C++, but Objective C as well) and since it's free with the base OS (which is also free) one need not run BCC or the other DOS compilers. GCC has several advantages that one will not find on the DOS compilers, such as the lack of memory models (memory is memory is memory anyway) which lets you do things like malloc() as much RAM as you want. (Incidentally, I was thrilled when I wrote a simple program that allocated two megs of RAM and it worked.) Also it optimizes very well for the 386/387. DOS compilers can't even come close. (I did look at MSC 7.0, which at one time purported to add 386 code generation, but they ended up taking it out.) As far as applications go, linux does have a DOS emulator that more or less works. New versions can even run highly graphical games like F19 and probably the Sierra games, as well as character based applications such as Word Perfect and Quicken. (With sufficient RAM and swap space, and a sufficiently fast processor, one can run easily multiple instances of the DOS emulator, each running a separate application. Early versions of OS/2 only had one "DOS box" and I doubt it could run as many applications as the DOS emulator can now.) And it also has lots of other applications that will run directly. There is a great wealth of fre programs out there that will compile without much modification (zero in some cases) that once compiled, work on Linux. In addition to the standard utilities there are systems like troff and ghostscript (troff is a text markup language for document processing, ghostscript takes Postscript output, runs it, and derives a bitmap that can print on a dot matrix or laser printer), and TeX which serves well for some word processing tasks. (I get comparable output with TeX and ghostscript to Word 4 Windows, BTW. Also I used Publisher's Powerpak, and for some strange reason, equations in documents, while looking OK on the screen, always came up using different characters on the printer. Of course this works right in TeX and/or eqn, an equation preprocessor for troff. >Stephen Rozum >rozum@hpmtay.hp.lvld.com David E. Fox email: hip-hop!dfox@amdahl.com 5479 Castle Manor Drive San Jose, CA 95129 Thanks for letting me change the magnetic 408/ 253-7992 images on your hard drive. -- David E. Fox email: hip-hop!dfox@amdahl.com 5479 Castle Manor Drive San Jose, CA 95129 Thanks for letting me change the magnetic 408/ 253-7992 images on your hard drive. ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.help,comp.windows.x.i386unix From: dudek@acsu.buffalo.edu (The Cybard) Subject: Xfree bug in Linux, or hardware problem??? Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 19:52:39 GMT I have been suddenly experiencing a problem in Xfree86 under Linux, and I'm not sure if it is a software bug, or a sudden hardware failure. Here is my system: Insight 486DX-33 ISA, 64K cache 8 MB RAM IDE drive controller / IO card 130 MB Seagate HD (124MB DOS / 6MB Linux swap) 170 MB WD Caviar HD (170 MB Linux ext2fs) SoundBlaster Basic v1.0 (IRQ7) 14.4 K baud internal modem (COM2) Logitech busmouse Diamond SpeedStar 24 (not X) graphics card TVM MediaScan 4A+ monitor SLS 1.02 with the following upgrades: kernel pl11 GCC 2.4.5 libc 4.4.1 fvwm 0.92 Xfree 1.3 I have been running with this configuration for a while now, but just recently I've been experiencing the system hanging, especially while running kermit or Seyon with Xfree running. Also, I've been getting short horizontal line segments scattered in my xterm or on the root window, or both. (Aren't these usually a symptom of a bad video card?) Refreshing the screen does not work. I would only say that these problems might be related, only because they started happening at the same time. Is this a bug in Linux or Xfree, or is this a hardware problem? (or both?) Thanks. PS: I run Xfree in 1152x900 mode using the freq program with the line: freq 62000 2 -- David Thomas Dudek / 098pwxs@ubvms.bitnet \ __ _ The Cybard State University / dudek@.acsu.buffalo.edu \ / `-' ) ,,, of New York / "If music be the food of love, \ | | ()|||||||[:::} @ Buffalo / play on!" - Wm. Shakespeare \ `__.-._) ''' ------------------------------ From: urlichs@smurfnbg.smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs) Subject: Re: mkdir says "no space left on device" and more problems... Date: 14 Aug 1993 14:12:05 +0200 In comp.os.linux, article <1993Aug11.001410.12201@kf8nh.wariat.org>, bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org (Brandon S. Allbery) writes: > > More specifically: the active flag ("bootflag") is used by the master boot > record. LILO replaces the master boot record, and uses its own scheme; it > ignores the flag. The benefit is that you can boot Linux even if it's on the > second drive (the standard MBR can only boot from a partition on the first > drive). > Be aware, however, that some braindamaged OSes (I know of SCO, don't know what the other commercial Unixes do) _do_ use that flag after booting, so if you want to boot both SCO and Linux from one HD you'll have to mark the SCO partition as active and install LILO in the MBR. -- Matthias Urlichs -- urlichs@smurf.sub.org -- Phone: NONE; use email or lose. Schleiermacherstrasse 12 -- 90491 Nuernberg -- Germany || Linux+Mac Consulting ------------------------------ From: urlichs@smurfnbg.smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs) Subject: Re: DOS FDISK trashed my partition table, can I save my Linux on /de Date: 14 Aug 1993 15:54:48 +0200 In comp.os.linux, article <1wB28B1w165w@xivic.bo.open.de>, ws@xivic.bo.open.de (Wolfgang Schelongowski) writes: > urlichs@smurfnbg.smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs) writes: > : In comp.os.linux, article , > : thiele@MB3.TU-Chemnitz.DE (Ralf Thiele) writes: > : > I wrote a little program, that clears the Partition Table via BIOS-Int 13h > : > : dd count=1 bs=512 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda ## or /dev/sda or whatever > > Ever tried that ? That will NUKE your BOOTSTRAPLOADER and the _total_ > partition table. > I know that. Ralf's article says "clear the partition table" and that's exactly what the above command does. Yes, I have tried the above command -- formatting a disk initializes all blocks with hex 5A or some such and the Linux fdisk doesn't like that at all. -- Matthias Urlichs -- urlichs@smurf.sub.org -- Phone: NONE; use email or lose. Schleiermacherstrasse 12 -- 90491 Nuernberg -- Germany || Linux+Mac Consulting ------------------------------ From: cls@truffula.sj.ca.us (Cameron L. Spitzer) Subject: Re: Is 3c509 driver there yet? Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 19:12:46 GMT In article <745286478.AA05485@psybbs.durham.nc.us> Derek.Bischoff%f1.n3641.z1@psybbs.durham.nc.us (Derek Bischoff) writes: > > > >3COM supplies MSDOS drivers to sell their cards to the largest audience. > >eh? >3com I know that 3com has been a part of the development of drivers >for many other operating systems, and the companies there of. >However, I wouldn't expect them to spend money to develop drivers >for Linux enthus', (We propably buy our cards used they would say) :) Actually, several of us are keenly interested in seeing this happen. But the set who are interested and the set who are equipped to do anything about it are disjoint sets. :-( I've seen a "pre-alpha" driver but its author asked me not to advertise it till he gets the bugs out. Sure wish I could help, but I just don't know enough about the higher layers to know what's supposed to be happening. I suspect it drops things because the 2K frame buffers are too small for a high-latency OS if you don't use the predictive interrupts. Of course, we pay more attention to what our customers demand. We log customer calls. There have been *zero* calls logged by 3Com Customer Service requesting a Linux driver. *That* is why there is no Linux driver in the 3Com Network Adapter Division "New Product Funnel". It is exactly the same reason why there is no CP/M-86 nor OS9 driver there. >any way, I wouldn't worry too much yet. >Evern Cryer has not come up with a driver for the 3c9. Crynwr has a DOS "packet driver" for 3C509 in some kind of assembly language. I took a quick look and couldn't make any sense of it. >(come to think of it, I have two SCO boxes and they don't have drivers >for the 9 yet either. As far as I know, we are up to date with SCO. Some of the newer ones (eg. the current ODT) are on our BBS but not on Etherdisk. For what SCO product don't you have a 3C509 driver? Have you asked 3Com Customer Service where it is? Cameron work: camerons@nad.3Com.com home: cls@truffula.sj.ca.us ------------------------------ From: adam@veda.is (Adam David) Crossposted-To: comp.os.386bsd.development Subject: Re: More annoyance on the DMA problem Date: 14 Aug 93 19:55:12 GMT gillham@isengard.cs.andrews.edu (Andrew Gillham) writes: >Why the hell do I care if my floppy disk drive is 100% optimized >as long as it can read the stupid disks? I personally have ZERO >interest in using floppies for *ANYTHING* except the bare minimum >necessary to boot my stinkin' PC! What about transferring to DOS floppies for exchange of files between (unconnected) machines? It is not necessarily true that another machine with floppies is on the same network. >What's wrong with a SCSI tape >drive? These floppy attached ones are nothing but trouble! >They may be great in the single-tasking DOS world, but seem like >a real pain in the multi-tasking world. Buy a stinkin' SCSI >tape drive if you're *serious* about backing up your machine! By the same token, why bother supporting serial ports or parallel ports or anything that can be hung off a SCSI controller? You don't need a floppy controller if you have a SCSI-based floppy drive or floptical, and you don't need the serial/parallel card if you have a SCSI-based serial/parallel multiplexer unit. For that matter, it is also possible to get SCSI-based ethernet interfaces. Insert smileys as necessary. -- adam@veda.is ------------------------------ From: jrichert@krefcom.GUN.de (Jan Richert) Subject: traceroute and dig available? Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 20:14:54 GMT Hi... Are the traceroute and dig commands ported to Linux yet? If so.. where are they available from? PLEASE REPLY BY MAIL - I'LL SUMMARIZE Thanks Jan -- Jan Richert (NIC-ID: JR482) | Internet: jrichert@krefcom.GUN.de Krefeld, FRG | Datex-J: 02151399843-0001 Voice: +49 2151 313124 | IRC-Nick: jrichert FAX: +49 2151 396479 | Data: +49 2151 396479 (12-20h MEDT) ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.development From: zmbenhal@netcom.com (Zeyd M. Ben-Halim) Subject: Re: Ncurses, how do I... Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 20:34:53 GMT In article <1993Aug14.125802.5608@turtle.apana.org.au> fozzie@turtle.apana.org.au (Fozzie Bear) writes: >I am trying to do some C programming under Linux. I am having trouble with >a particular routine I am pretty sure it's in the ncurses library. What am >I trying to do is the following. > >Print some text, then have the user input *1* character of information. >getchar() only works if you hit carriage return. I want the user to just hit >one key on the keyboard and then have that keystroke returned to the calling >part of the program. Sort of like an inkey function in BASIC. That is NORMAL behavior (see manual.doc). By default input is in cooked mode, which means it waits for a whole line terminated by and allows you to erase characters, etc. There are two alternative modes: cbreak() which will allow you to read one character at a time, and raw() which is the same but you can't use signals (^c, ~z, etc) you have to trap them yourself). Zeyd >My C is a little rusty, so please email me with any info to help solve this >problem. I am also then interested to see what command syntax I need to use >to cc (what -l options do I need to use?) > >Thanks, >Fozzie > >-- >------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >fozzie@turtle.apana.org.au I'm looking for an ascii turtle picture. > If you've got one, email it to me! ------------------------------ From: zmbenhal@netcom.com (Zeyd M. Ben-Halim) Subject: Re: Who is in charge of curses? Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 20:57:23 GMT In article <1993Aug12.133256.29683@nynexst.com> hjl@nynexst.com (H.J. Lu) writes: >In article , b-o@cs.umu.se (Bengt-Ove Johansson) writes: >|> Is there anybody working on the curses library that comes with mcc (I think >|> it is the same library that comes with sls and I don't mean ncurses). I've >|> found a very annoying bug (scrolling windows doesn't work) in that library >|> and is just asking if someone else has done the job or is thinking of doing >|> it before I start ;-) . >|> >|> /b-o! > >I don't know anyone who is working on the curses in the Linux C library. But >I am preparing to dump it for the ncurses once the nncurses is stabilized. What is the definition of stability? >The main problem is I am not sure if the ncurses is 100% compatible with >the old one. I am concerned about the shared library. The likelyhood of libncurses.so being a drop-in replacement for libcurses.so is extremely remote. Both curses.h and ncurses.h make extensive use of macros to hide implementation details, which means that the set functions supplied by each library is different. I'm not sure how much of a problem this is likely to be. Not that many programs depend on current shared curses library. If they do they should seriously consider recompiling with ncurses. BTW, are you aware that tcdrain() is broken on Linux. tcdrain(1) gives an: argument invalid error. This also messes up with pcomm. >H.J. Zeyd ------------------------------ ** FOR YOUR REFERENCE ** The service address, to which questions about the list itself and requests to be added to or deleted from it should be directed, is: Internet: Linux-Activists-Request@NEWS-DIGESTS.MIT.EDU You can send mail to the entire list (and comp.os.linux) via: Internet: Linux-Activists@NEWS-DIGESTS.MIT.EDU Linux may be obtained via one of these FTP sites: nic.funet.fi pub/OS/Linux tsx-11.mit.edu pub/linux tupac-amaru.informatik.rwth-aachen.de pub/msdos/replace The current version of Linux is 0.99pl9 released on April 23, 1993 End of Linux-Activists Digest ******************************