From: Digestifier To: Linux-Development@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu Reply-To: Linux-Development@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu Date: Wed, 22 Sep 93 08:13:09 EDT Subject: Linux-Development Digest #116 Linux-Development Digest #116, Volume #1 Wed, 22 Sep 93 08:13:09 EDT Contents: Q: Anyone working on OS/2's HPFS for Linux? (Mark Biegler) RLOGIN FIX (John Fauerbach) Re: No smart serial boards??? (Leslie Mikesell) Re: What do people think about /config? (Kevin Brown) Re: EXT2 fs bug? (Stephen Tweedie) Re: GCC, is it a bug or isn't it? (Brandon S. Allbery) Re: Gateway with SMC16 (Donald J. Becker) Re: To all device driver writers; boot-time messages. (Donald J. Becker) TERM is a registered trademark (Russell Nelson) Re: Please no /config. (Matthew Dillon) Re: Linux, Notebooks, XFree86, and LCDs (William E. Harvey) Re: TERM is a registered trademark (Patrick J. Volkerding) Re: (HELP) Internet BBS (phried phun) Re: Linux, Notebooks, XFree86, and LCDs (Rick Frankel) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: biegler@borealis.cs.uregina.ca (Mark Biegler) Subject: Q: Anyone working on OS/2's HPFS for Linux? Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1993 19:20:59 GMT I don't know if it's just a local problem, or what, but it seems my text didn't appear in the message... I'll try again. Hello, I was wondering if anyone has been working on developing the HPFS filesystem for use under Linux. I'm an OS/2 & Linux advocate, and I'd like to be able to mount HPFS partitions at one point in time. If anyone has been working on this, I'd really like to know, because I'm considering working on it myself. And if anyone can point me to information on the HPFS, I'd appreciate it. (I've already found the HPFS.doc in pub/linux/info on tsx-11.mit.edu) Thanks muchly! - Mark Mark Biegler (VE1MPB) biegler@cs.uregina.ca Department of Computer Science W: (306) 585-4110 University of Regina H: (306) 522-1770 Regina, Saskatchewan Canada S4S 0A2 Office: CW 307.12 ------------------------------ From: fauerbac@clyde.cs.unca.edu (John Fauerbach) Subject: RLOGIN FIX Date: 21 Sep 1993 18:44:44 GMT I uploaded a fix version of rlogin to sunsite.unc.edu in the directory /pub/Linux/system/Network/r-tools. I have been using this for about a week with none of the problems that the old one had. John Fauerbach ------------------------------ From: les@chinet.chinet.com (Leslie Mikesell) Subject: Re: No smart serial boards??? Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1993 19:17:09 GMT In article <27jt0m$lr5@agate.berkeley.edu>, Ken Geis wrote: > I read in the (I believe) serial FAQ that no drivers exist for >intelligent serial multi-port boards. The FAQ also mentioned that they >would likely ever exist. Can anyone explain to me why? Intelligent boards are normally proprietrary designs with drivers provided by the vendors. If the vendors don't see a potential market to pay for the effort to write, distribute and maintain linux drivers there won't be any. Unless, of course, linux is modified to be able to use sysvr4 driver files or someone writes a binary translator from coff/elf to whatever linux wants. > I'd like to >run a good size BB from a Linux box, but I won't start writing it until >I know it can work A possible alternative would be to use an ethernet terminal server. The cost of these tends to be a bit higher than ISA multi-port cards, but the ability to connect to different machines might be worth the difference, especially if you don't have the driver you need for a directly attached board. Is anyone using one of these or a Netblazer with linux? (I have to get some more programming experience too, >but that's beside the point :) ). Thanks in advance, How about writing software to make a DOS PC operate like a two-serial, two-parallel port terminal server? Les Mikesell les@chinet.com ------------------------------ From: kevin@frobozz.sccsi.com (Kevin Brown) Subject: Re: What do people think about /config? Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1993 20:46:49 GMT In article jgrape@coos.dartmouth.edu (Johan A. Grape) writes: >I think that the /config idea spurs from unix sysadm >suddenly becoming a job for every PEECEE owner now >that linux is around. Yup. That's my assessment as well. >I can't help but think that >it is a really bad idea to differ from the standard >unix filesystem. With hopes of getting some commercial >software ported to linux and a general acceptance of this >as a _solid_ OS, I have to vote against. If the contents of /config are merely symlinks to the actual configuration files, then I really don't have much of a problem with it. Those of us who don't need /config can then simply remove it and be done with it. If there's any single standard that needs to exist with respect to config files, it's the use of a comment character. Most things can use '#' at the beginning of a line to indicate a comment. I suggest that everything be modified to deal with that. Then you include sufficient documentation in comments to enable novice admins to get a handle on what they're doing when they look at the file. This, of course, is for system configuration files that don't have a specific application that uses them. Application configuration files should be managed by the applications themselves when at all possible. What knows better what it's looking for than the application? If applications are made responsible for managing their own configuration files, then the responsibility for knowing about configuration files will be distributed appropriately. Any other "solution" simply adds unneeded complexity to what's already there. People who come from the MS-LOSS world don't seem to realize that the reason Unix is more complex to administrate is that Unix is a more complex system! Furthermore, how can you effectively manage a system if you don't know how the pieces are supposed to work? Configuration files give you a clue about how things work. Knowing about them is an advantage. I do admit that there are some configuration files for which a front-end editor would be really useful. Sendmail.cf comes to mind. :-) -- Kevin Brown kevin@frobozz.sccsi.com This is your .signature virus: < begin 644 .signature (9V]T8VAA(0K0z end > This is your .signature virus on drugs: <> Any questions? ------------------------------ From: sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Stephen Tweedie) Subject: Re: EXT2 fs bug? Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1993 19:58:38 GMT > Anyone know of a fix for this? Why did it happen? The file system has > been fsck'd, many times. It comes up clean every time. I have bombed > the system, but the drives get fsck'd upon boot up everytime (in other > words, I don't the filesystems "dirty") Yup. Grab the latest e2fsck; you can find it on ftp.dcs.ed.ac.uk in pub/sct. I don't know whether it has appeared anywhere else publicly. Previous versions of e2fsck did not always correctly check the free block/inode counts for the last block group in a filesystem. Cheers, Stephen. --- Stephen Tweedie (JANET: sct@uk.ac.ed.dcs) Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh University, Scotland. ------------------------------ From: bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org (Brandon S. Allbery) Subject: Re: GCC, is it a bug or isn't it? Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1993 00:12:34 GMT In article mauer@mcs.anl.gov (Andrew Mauer) writes: >>>>>> On Thu, 16 Sep 1993 16:21:44 GMT, jhenders@jonh.wimsey.bc.ca (John Henders) said: >zmbenhal@netcom.com (Zeyd M. Ben-Halim) writes: >>>#ifdef NEVER_DEFINED >>> Hey you dummy, you defined NEVER_DEFINED. >>>#endif >>> The GCC compilere would complain and give me an error condtion on the >>#ifdef NEVER_DEFINED >>#error Hey you dummy, you defined NEVER_DEFINED. >>#endif >John> Unless I'm missing something here, the above should work. According >John> to K&R, A 12.5, "text controlled by inactive arms of the conditional is >John> ignored except for checking the nesting of conditionals." >And, in fact, the following test programs both compile without a >problem with gcc 2.4.5, so I don't understand what the problem is. End >user error? Or the line is actually something like You shouldn't have defined NEVER_DEFINED and gcc tripped over the unmatched single quote, which ANSI compilers are apparently allowed (supposed?) to do. ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery kf8nh@kf8nh.ampr.org bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org "MSDOS didn't get as bad as it is overnight -- it took over ten years of careful development." ---dmeggins@aix1.uottawa.ca ------------------------------ From: becker@super.org (Donald J. Becker) Subject: Re: Gateway with SMC16 Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1993 14:20:00 GMT In article , wrote: >I need to build a Gateway between thin and tp-Ethernet. This will likely require running gated. Read the manual page. >In the HOWTO's was written that you should simply add an "Eth1"-Device in Space.c >to install a second Ethernet-card. This doesnt seem so easy to me and I can't see >a way to do this. It not really very difficult, but you might be more confident starting with the new 0.99pl13 kernel. It already has entries in net/inet/Space.c for "eth0", "eth1", "eth2", and "eth3". You can either edit the "eth0" and "eth1" entries directly and then build a new kernel, or build an unmodified pl13 kernel and set the ethercard addresses using LILO. The boot-time parameters would look like: lilo-prompt: linux ether=11,0x280,eth0 ether=10,0x300,eth1 Where the first ethercard is at 0x280, IRQ11 and the second at 0x300, IRQ10. An alternate line is: lilo-prompt: linux ether=eth0 ether=0,0,eth1 Which tells the kernel to autoIRQ and autoprobe for the second ethercard. I believe you can also make this automatic by putting the correct lines in /etc/lilo/config, and running 'lilo'. Check the manual for LILO 0.12 or later. -- Donald Becker becker@super.org IDA Supercomputing Research Center 17100 Science Drive, Bowie MD 20715 301-805-7482 ------------------------------ From: becker@super.org (Donald J. Becker) Subject: Re: To all device driver writers; boot-time messages. Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1993 14:48:45 GMT In article , Michael A. Irons wrote: >In article <1993Sep17.184413.6604@super.org>, >Donald J. Becker wrote: > Stuff I didn't want to comment on deleted > >>> This way you can >>> easily upgrade drivers, create special kernels with/without certain drivers >>> and commercial software/hardware developers can provide binary only drivers. >> >>This would be a Very Bad Thing. Luckily the GPL should protect the kernel >>itself from object-only distributions. [[ Slightly off topic here...]] But if >>we had a standard, published interface definition for loadable device drivers >>I suspect it would take only weeks before we had proprietary, binary-only >>drivers. People with a short-term perspective might not find that dangerous, >>or even undesirable, but I certainly do. > > Shame on you Don, that is no reason for having bad or >confusing code. ... > Your statement sounds almost like the old programmers >job-security adage "keep it confusing so they won't fire me". Wait a minute here, you completely misread the message and needlessly flamed me. Ouch, ouch, ouch, put that out. In no way am I advocating obfuscicating any code. I think Linux device drivers should be as clear as possible while remaining concise. I'm talking about _loadable_ device drivers, where an object code module is distributed seperately from the kernel, and can be loaded into the kernel at the user-level after the kernel has booted. If Linux 1.00 has that as a standard feature we will likely see a considerable number of proprietary device drivers. >I liked Minix, where I could add a driver stub in an hour or >two because the code was easy to read, and laid out well. I did write a network device driver stub, and a number of people have used it to start writing ethercard drivers. I'm not trying to establish any "job security" or power trip here: it's in my best interest to have other people write the device drivers. I just want to benefit from the availability of the source code. Please, save your flames for those people that post "I know the FAQ said not to, but I bought a Diamond card anyway. Where is the patch." They will someday be posting "My object-only loadable device driver doesn't work, help me!" -- Donald Becker becker@super.org IDA Supercomputing Research Center 17100 Science Drive, Bowie MD 20715 301-805-7482 ------------------------------ From: nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson) Subject: TERM is a registered trademark Date: Wed, 22 Sep 93 02:08:00 GMT TERM is a registered trademark of Century Software. Maybe the free "term" package should be called termlink? -russ What canst *thou* say? Crynwr Software Crynwr Software sells packet driver support. 11 Grant St. 315-268-1925 Voice | LPF member - ask me about Potsdam, NY 13676 315-268-9201 FAX | the harm software patents do. ------------------------------ From: dillon@moonshot.west.oic.com (Matthew Dillon) Subject: Re: Please no /config. Date: 22 Sep 1993 00:16:09 -0700 In article <1993Sep19.181751.6423@bhhome.ci.net> bill@bhhome.ci.net (Bill Heiser) writes: :In article <27b6dn$l99@galaxy.ucr.edu> grif@ucrengr.ucr.edu (Michael Griffith) writes: :> :>Please don't mess with the standard filesystem layout. It would make :>life more difficult for those with experience with other UNIX-like :>operating systems. : :I second this request. Changing the "standard" filesystem layout to :something unique to LINUX would mean we could no-longer say that LINUX :is "just like a typical Unix" ... and would make it less desireable for :many of us. I, for one, want what I run on my home machine to resemble :what I use in the real world ... ie. right now, when I use LINUX on my :home machine, it's not much different (aside from display resolution and :system speed) than the Sun IPX sitting on my desk at work, at least on :a basic level.. : : :-- :Bill Heiser bill@bhhome.ci.net -or- heiser@world.std.com I'm half and half on it... for myself, having a separate /conf to hold system-specific files on the root partition makes managing multiple machines much easier... the entire root partition is the same on each machine except for /conf (or /config or whatever you want to call it). But as far as distributions go, I think the files ought to be in standard places. Probably over half of the Linux community are single-machine owners with no need for a /conf, and as the above person mentioned, most people with unix experience tend to like to start out with files in standard places and customize as they go. -Matt Matthew Dillon dillon@moonshot.west.oic.com 1005 Apollo Way dillon@overload.berkeley.ca.us Incline Village, NV. 89451 ham: KC6LVW (no mail drop) USA Sandel-Avery Engineering (702)831-8000 [always include a portion of the original email in any response!] ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.help,comp.windows.x.i386unix From: weh@beta.lanl.gov (William E. Harvey) Subject: Re: Linux, Notebooks, XFree86, and LCDs Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1993 07:31:40 GMT In article vera@fanaraaken.Stanford.EDU (James S. Vera) writes: >pcolsen@super.org (Peter C Olsen) writes: > >>I'm looking for anyone who has ever successfully installed Linux and >>XFree86 on an LCD laptop. I have a laptop that I carry for school and ... >I run the mono server of XFree version 1.2 on my Compaq LTE386s/20 >notebook. It installed with no problems. I tried Xega but its font >support seemed kinda clunky and I can live with mono for now. I can't >switch to an external monitor as that is done through software and I >haven't gotten around to finding the necessary BIOS call... ... I use linux on a monochrome Packard Bell daily for 2 years now. Installed with no problems. X runs fine (in mono). An external monitor works fine also if I switch to it during the bios bootup, i.e. before you see the "LILO loading ..." message using a key on the PB for that. My problem is I want a bigger hard disk. 80 megs ain't enough. Anyone know where I can buy one of those new 2 1/2 inch 340 meg Toshibas? Billy Harvey weh@lanl.gov ------------------------------ From: bf703@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) Subject: Re: TERM is a registered trademark Date: 22 Sep 1993 08:07:04 GMT Reply-To: bf703@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) In a previous article, nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson) says: >TERM is a registered trademark of Century Software. > OH NO! Does this mean we have to rename the TERM environment variable? ;^) -- Patrick Volkerding volkerdi@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu bf703@cleveland.freenet.edu ------------------------------ From: nawaz921@crow.crow.csrv.uidaho.edu (phried phun) Subject: Re: (HELP) Internet BBS Date: 22 Sep 1993 10:17:33 GMT In article <2789eh$bmn@lester.appstate.edu> CA6343@CONRAD.APPSTATE.EDU (Abad, Christian Nicholas ) writes: Currently I am looking towards Linux, well, for obvious reasons. So the question is this: What is a good BBS shell that will run under Linux? (It must be Internet compatable, since this BBS will be accessable by direct dial-up or through an IP address via Internet.) ANY info pointing in this direction would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance, Christian (my $0.02): You could try yabbs (available at a LOT of sites -- first one that comes to mind is phred.pc.cc.cmu.edu). It's pretty configureable. Linux isn't your only choice -- there are many BSD implementat- tions out there -- try FreeBSD or NetBSD. True, they won't have have X, but you don't seem to need that... ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.help,comp.windows.x.i386unix From: rfrankel@obelix.obelix.us.oracle.com (Rick Frankel) Subject: Re: Linux, Notebooks, XFree86, and LCDs Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1993 10:25:33 GMT In article vera@fanaraaken.Stanford.EDU (James S. Vera) writes: >I'm looking for anyone who has ever successfully installed Linux and >XFree86 on an LCD laptop. I have a laptop that I carry for school and >Reserves and I have been told that getting XFree to run on an LCD will >be non-trivial. I run the mono server of XFree version 1.2 on my Compaq LTE386s/20 notebook. It installed with no problems. I tried Xega but its font ...etc. I am running (now) XFree 1.3 in (grayscale) color on Compaq LTE line 4/25e (active matrix b&w). X installed and ran fine first time. it is configured to use the cpq_avga (i think that'w what it's called, it scrolled off my vir. console) driver. It found this by default. Though you'd be interested... rick -- rfrankel@us.oracle.com richard.frankel@amail.amdahl.com ------------------------------ ** 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-Development-Request@NEWS-DIGESTS.MIT.EDU You can send mail to the entire list (and comp.os.linux.development) via: Internet: Linux-Development@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 sunsite.unc.edu pub/Linux End of Linux-Development Digest ******************************