Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Debian GNU/Linux Community's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
7:33 pm [pthalogreen]	slow computer My computer is about 4 years old. In spring of 2007 I got sick of how slow it had gotten (in only two years!)... it took about 3 minutes from typing my password to my windows desktop loading. I had recently gotten a preview Vista on a friend's computer and decided that if I was going to have to learn an entirely new operating system when Vista became standard I might just as well learn linux. So I installed Debian and the slow computer problem was fixed. I installed Gnome because I was a newbie and didn't even know how to type "mv" in a terminal, and Gnome is friendly for newbies. A year later, though, my computer was slow again. I had, by that point, learned to type "mv" and was, in fact, using the terminal for most everything, so I looked into other, less bloated options, and I found Awesome WM, which was perfect for me: someone who prefers the keyboard to the mouse and is comfortable in a terminal window. I switched to Awesome and the slow computer problem was fixed again! It was so fast! Over time, I switched from Amarok to moc which also improved speed. As for browsers, I still haven't found anything that's not bloated, doesn't leak memory and still lets me use all the websites I want to use. Iceweasel? Huge memory leaks and bloated. Opera? Pretty, but bloated and crashes a lot. Epiphany? Ugly and leaks memory. If I have it open for more than ten minutes it gets really slow. I click a link, wait five minutes for it to figure out I've clicked a link, wait a few minutes for it to load the page... Dillo? Fast, but butchers CSS badly and chokes on most websites. Elinks? Fast, great, so much love for Elinks and I use it as much as I can, but Facebook tells me to get a modern browser and of course there's no youtube in Elinks. KOL also chokes on it, though a few years ago I was able to play it lynx (they've changed things I guess.) Also also it only seems to let me type in ascii (I need to type in Hungarian, Serbian and Macedonian on a regular basis), unless I tell it to switch to vim every time I want to type something. Yeah. Anyway, here we are, summer of 2009 and my little laptop is slow again. It can handle playing music with moc and browsing the web with elinks but not much else. It can't handle open office, so I use antiword to read and vim to write. Is there something I could be doing to make it less slow? My first idea is to make more free space on the harddrive, since I only have about 1 gig free. This would mean going through my (large) music collection and getting rid of songs I don't like and never listen to, but that will take forever (and would require listening to half of them to figure out whether I like them or not). I will be doing that slowly, but is there anything else I'm missing that I could be doing? Current Mood: hot Current Music: Тоше Проески - Зајди зајди јасно сонце (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
2:51 am [tonytraductor]	debian olive drab Debian olive drab 2 another wallpaper for your debian desktop Current Mood: amused Current Music: talk talk (Comment on this)
12:26 am [tonytraductor]	n00b - change keyboard layout? Hi. I just installed Debian Lenny on two machines in my office today. I've been using gnu/linux since 2000, but mostly stuck with distros that did more hand-holding, including redhat/fedora, pclinuxos, and ubuntu. So far, I'm digging Debian! :) my current desktop This wallpaper is available here. How do I change my keyboard layout? I need US-alt (former US-Intl). I don't have any gnome or kde tools installed for such purpose, having opted for a lite, lxde/openbox install. Thanks. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 21st, 2009
12:01 am [alexkuklin]	Could anyone share some sacred knowledge manual reference how could I get some driver out of kernel source tree, patch it and build with module-assistant? I started with apt-get source/patch/dpkg-buildpackage, but it's obvious it will build all kernel flavors and take a lot of time. Point is to build drivers/net/usb/dm9601.c with vid/pid 0x0fe6/0x8101 added (USB-LAN adapter). (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
4:07 pm [tobestool]	Exim4 + Clamav not scanning emails. Hi, I'm trying to reinstall my mailserver with Lenny, and in the process I want to set up exim to deal with my incoming email (fetched with fetchmail, not live SMTP), and scan it with clam and spamassasin. I followed the trusty HOWTO which I use every time I want to set a mail server up. However my email does not seem to be being scanned with Clam. If I send myself an email from root to my regular user account, it has headers inserted to say that spamassassin has run on it. However there is no mention of virus scanning, and no mention of any scanning in the logs for either exim or clam. My memory was that before, as soon as the line av_scanner = clamd:/var/run/clamav/clamd.ctl was put into /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/01_exim4-config_listmacrosdefs (and update-exim4.config run) virus scanning automatically happened, and from then it was a matter of dealing with how the email should be handled. Does anyone have any pointers as to what has changed / what I'm doing wrong, please? As a slightly related note, do people think that exim4 is a good choice for my needs, bearing in mind that I look after several small servers with a similar configuration, with email coming in with fetchmail and being distributed to user(s) via IMAP. I've a growing feeling that exim is rather overkill for what I'm doing, not to mention that whenever I want to change anything, it seems to take me about three days to get my head round all the documentation... So does anyone want to recommend a better way that I should be going about this? Thanks in advance. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
2:44 pm [mrflash818]	Debian Lenny - how to configure tdfx video resolutions Hey all, I cannot remember how to configure monitor resolutions for X. Currently running Debian Lenny stable. I am running it on a PC with the xwindow pkgs for tdfx, and have a nice, but humble voodoo 3dfx card. Oh, and my monitor is a Viewsonic A70, if that matters. My box is running great, but I am pretty sure I was able to run in 1024x768 mode in Etch stable , it seems to be unable to switch modes to higher than that when cycling through resolutions via "ctrl alt +" , or "ctrl alt -". So far I have simply done a basic "sudo aptitude dist-upgrade", so simply cannot remember how to configure X. Will keep googling, but do share if you can remind me of the commands and/or settings to enable 1024x768 mode. Thanks Current Mood: geeky (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 15th, 2009
12:43 pm [arricc]	Lenny Thats Lenny been released as stable: http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/2009/msg00002.html There's a good piece on it over at Debian Administration (debadminfull) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
4:54 pm [dooferlad]	SATA on Debian 4.0 Hi, I have a rather ageing Debian machine which is running 4.0 with a custom kernel (2.6.20.6). It is a Via C3 Ezra machine running at 800Mhz. I recently ran out of both disk space and PATA slots so I jumped in with a SATA controller based on the Silicon Image SIL3512 chipset and a SATA hard disk. The SATA BIOS loads when the machine starts but in Debian I don't see any more entries in /dev. I have enabled the required drivers in the kernel (I think). I don't mind going back to a stock kernel if someone will tell me how. I am at the point where backing up and re-installing seems like a good option, but that would involve a lot of hassle setting up everything again, so I would rather not. Thanks for any help you can give me. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008
2:29 pm [t_c_da]	rdesktop on Lenny I have this weird problem using rdesktop from Lenny into an ancient Windows NT host that is keyboard related, but all my attempts to correct it seem to make it worse... Initially, everything worked fine with this setup, then a month or so ago I lost all (Ctrl) key events on the remote host. This was most peculiar as they still work fine locally. This seemed to have been caused by my attempting t define my keyboard to Gnome - it is a Labtec wireless k/b & Mouse combination on the PS/2 port of the machine. The keyboard behaves as a standard 104/105 key US model with additional multimedia keys that I have ignored. Then about a week ago I had another go at defining a standard US keyboard to Gnome and now I have lost the arrow keys as well as the (Ctrl) keys, in fact any key sequence that requires a (Ctrl) code like (PgUp) & (PgDn). [Edit] Note that throughout all this the (Alt) key still works fine as do the F1 thru' F12 keys. Other folk using the standard windows remote terminal software have no issues with the host, so I believe we can rule that out. RTFM doesn't offer any obvious clues to my addled brain... Any helpful suggestions out there? Current Mood: frustrated (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
4:34 pm [pthalogreen]	upgrading to lenny part 2 Thanks for all the help, I've gotten things about 95% sorted out. Everything is now upgraded, no more errors there and it all looks nice. The only remaining problem is that I still can't use su or sudo. hannah@Hannah:~$ su Password: su: Bad item passed to pam_*_item() hannah@Hannah:~$ I don't know what pam.d/su is supposed to look like, but here's what mine looks like: ( pam.d/su ) I can't log in (under any username) when I boot normally, but I can log in if I boot in single-user mode. That's the only circumstances under which it takes the root password. Then I can type gdm and login using my regular username and password. If I want to do something as root, I have to reboot and do it before starting X. So that's a somewhat-viable work around for the meantime, and I'm glad I've gotten it as working as it is. Apparently, one of the things that was causing the errors I was previously having was an old libz in /usr/local/lib, the install went really smoothly after removing that. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 26th, 2008
10:03 am [pthalogreen]	upgrading to lenny So I started upgrading from etch to lenny last night. Really should've waited till the weekend. I left it running while I went to sleep, but ran out of disc space so I had to delete some stuff, made plenty of room, and tried again this morning while getting myself ready for work. So far, I'm having three problems: The first problem isn't a huge priority, I can deal with it later, but: ( locale, language settings ) Second problem, quite serious: ( e: sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) ) So, I had to leave for work, but I wasn't sure that I could turn my laptop back on if I turned it off, under these conditions so I left it running, but did exit out of su in my terminal window. Which brings us to problem 3: ( can't use 'su' ) Current Mood: confused (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 7th, 2008
9:18 pm [jhf]	Apt-cacher-ng or Approx? After four years or so with Ubuntu, I have, erm, returned to the fold, and I'm running Debian sid again. So I'm going to need a caching APT proxy again. I ditched apt-cacher because it was more trouble than it was worth, considering the (in)frequency of updates to an Ubuntu release. Which is like to cause the least pain, apt-cacher-ng or approx? Does anyone here have any experience with this software? apt-cacher was *slow* when serving anything not in cache, especially when updating the package indices. Worst of all was the way it would sometimes stop sending a client data -- and yet not drop the connection -- so APT would just *hang*, and you couldn't tell if it was wedged or just making progress in its usual leisurely way until the connection timed out. I want to run the proxy that doesn't do that. Or maybe I'd just be better off using Squid for this? ISTR Squid worked well, except it was a royal pain to delete corrupt downloads out of the cache. I'm going to try apt-cacher-ng first of the lot. Any input would be appreciated. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 1st, 2008
10:33 pm [dennisthetiger]	ssh key-based login not working This spans several boxes, but for now we'll focus on my own - my workstation running testing, and my server, running stable. Recently, I've noticed that all of my key-based ssh logins for various shell accounts I have scattered about the 'net have decided to simply malfunction - that is, they have the classic symptoms of simply "not working". Tonight, I regenerated all of my keys, and put the appropriate .pub files into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on each server, . No dice. Since they're not sitting on my sofa and eating all the food in my pantry, I've included a pastebin link to avoid cluttering up the post here. Point being, as near as I can tell, I've done everything correctly - and in this case, for some reason, everything is going into ~/.ssh2 on the server running stable. Evidently, however, I haven't done everything correctly, otherwise it would work. So what did I miss? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
3:02 am [pouchedfox]	question for college students I have ubuntu installed on my laptop (though debian lenny is nice) I was curious what apps other college students find useful? thanks. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
8:43 pm [fortifiedi]	Singling out partitions from whole drive images... So let's say that I've made an image backup of an entire drive with the dd command that contains several partitions. Is there any easy way to restore only a single partition from that single, whole drive image? Example... Created whole disk backup with: dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/backup/disk.img ... and I want to restore /dev/sda5, which is contained somewhere inside disk.img I assume I can specify a start byte and end byte in calling the dd command, thus singling out the partition. But, is there an easier, less low-level way? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
2:45 pm [jhf]	'Cause my own journal doesn't get indexed, as much as anything: I spent a few hours on this today: Samba 3.2, and the Samba package in Debian since Dec 2007 or so, include a patch to disable the weaker LANMAN and plaintext authentication methods by default. That's a good thing. But if you want to connect DOS or WfW clients to Samba, you'll need to renable that in smb.conf.... The bit that cost me a chunk of my afternoon is that, after enabling the weaker auth methods, you'll need to re-add all the SMB passwords that were set since the change -- it seems that smbpasswd(8) doesn't put the hashes for the weak authentication methods in the tdb if those methods are not enabled in smb.conf. I'm guessing it's a good thing not to be storing those weak password hashes if they're not needed... but I'm glad I only had the one user to worry about! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, July 14th, 2008
7:02 pm [6ferrets]	dead keys not working in KDE and the "US intl" keyboard I'm using Debian sid and KDE, and dead keys in the US international keyboard layout currently work in some applications but not others. For example, I can type "fête française" into this message via Iceweasel, but I get no output when I type “^e” or <alt-,> in Konsole or Open Office. I've reconfigured the KDE keyboard tool, installed font packages, and run dpkg-reconfigure but to no avail. It used to work just fine. I use the US international layout only occasionally, so I don't know precisely when this problem started, whether it's due to an upgrade, or if I messed up a setting somewhere. I don't think I'd changed anything relevant, but evidently I don't know what to look for. Any idea what the problem is? (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
5:56 pm [fireghost]	Hi, I'm new here. I recently moved from Ubuntu Gutsy to Debian Lenny and have been revelling in the increased speed and things working as they should. (Brilliant, from this "strictly a user" user's - or perennial n00b's - point of view.) Well, "working as they should" except for flash videos. I can download them and watch them OK (which is fine most of the time), but not live, when I get sound but no picture (or a sliver at the foot of the frame). I can't figure it out. Is it possible to have too many flash softwares trying to grab the same pie slice at once? Another symptom is that trying to watch a video live freezes Iceweasel. Removing libflash-swfplayer has helped a bit, stopping garbled audio and reducing the freeze time. Listed in about:plugins I see: -- libswfdecmozilla.so (Adobe Flash 9.0 .swf files and FutureSplash .spl) -- libtotem-basic-plugin.so (which includes generic flash .flv) -- libtotem-complex-plugin.so (for RealAudio audio and video .rpm) -- libtotem-gmp-plugin.so (covers Windows media suffixes like .avi) -- libtotem-mully-plugin.so (DivX avi .divx); and libtotem-narrowspace-plugin.so (Quicktime suffixes) I'm kicking myself for not keeping notes when I installed these plugins. My specs are P4 2.4 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 128 MB graphics. Flash worked fine with Ubuntu but I can't do a plugin comparison because the Lenny installer didn't recognize an apparently hibernating Gutsy and deleted it. I didn't consider it a loss until now. Another thing. It seems that, unlike with Ubuntu, all videos on my screen come with a grey overlay with an arrow on them that I have to click on to see what's underneath. Is this normal, and if it is, does anyone know why this feature exists and whether it can be removed? Edited 14 July: got it sorted by adding debian-multimedia.org to my sources.list and installing flash-nonfree, then removing all installed swf components via Synaptic. Doing this also removed the annoying grey overlay. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 5th, 2008
8:04 am [mrflash818]	Debian and a Motorazr v3m phone - how to usb mount? Greets everyone. I have a work cell phone that was issued to me, a motorola motorazr v3m. When I plug my usb into it, debian tries to automount, but doesn't recognize the filesystem, so I cannot access any photos I took with the phone. Anyone heard of a module, utility, or mount instruction to connect usb with the phone and debian/linux? Thanks (x-posted from the SGVLUG and LJs linux forums) Current Music: none (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 30th, 2008
1:48 pm [telegamochka]	Debian: username without alphabetical characters I try to switch Fedora 7 on my wearable computer (based on MSI MegaBook S260) to Debian (4, stable release). Because I use my notebook as wearable, it is important for me to log in the system when my notebook works in the backpack. In Fedora 7 I use for that external USB numpad choosing 0**0 as login. But Debian's installation program requires login started with alphabetical character. And this mean that I must take off and open my backpack, take the notebook, open it to login. Is there some way to use in Debian login characters that I can type in with numpad keys only? ( Тот же вопрос по-русски ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)