Debian GNU/Linux Community

Singling out partitions from whole drive images...

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:43:13 GMT

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?

'Cause my own journal doesn't get indexed, as much as anything:

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:45:51 GMT

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!

dead keys not working in KDE and the "US intl" keyboard

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 02:11:26 GMT

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?

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 07:09:01 GMT

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.

Debian and a Motorazr v3m phone - how to usb mount?

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:06:03 GMT

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)

Debian: username without alphabetical characters

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:02:13 GMT

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?

Debian: имя пользователя без букв

По ряду причин перехожу с Fedora 7 на Debian 4. Так как у меня носимый комп, для меня важно иметь возможность залогиниться "вслепую" - не доставая работающий ноутбук из сумки. Под Fedora 7 для этих целей я использовала внешнюю цифровую (numpad) USB-клавиатуру, выбрав в качестве имени 0**0 и пароль, полностью состоящий из цифр. Под Debian'ом программа установки жестко требует, чтобы логин начинался "со строчной латинской буквы". Есть ли возможность как-то обойти это ограничение?

Two shell hacks

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:55:37 GMT

I wrote two recent unix shell posts.

The time command on GNU/Linux changes depending on how you use it.

See Timing processes in the shell.

After changing the organization of files on a file system, it's often useful to display the end result.

See Finding "leaf" nodes on a file system.

10 причин освоить Linux сегодня

Mon, 12 May 2008 17:50:39 GMT

© Photo courtesy of Larry Ewing, Simon Budig and Anja Gerwinski.

Disclaimer: Цель данного поста — дать людям возможность попробовать что-то новое, а вовсе не начать новую волну флейма linux vs. windows.

1. Linux бесплатен
Это значит, что за большинство дистрибутивов не надо платить. Вообще. Их можно абсолютно легально скачать в Интернете или купить на рынке и установить на любое количество компьютеров.
Лицензия GNU GPL, распространяющаяся на Linux, предоставляет следующие права:

(читать полностью...)

Pidgin 2.4.x on Etch?

Sun, 11 May 2008 23:08:03 GMT

I have a friend whom I am supporting on Etch (I myself run Sid). I build a few programs for him as they are updated, Wine being the major one. Wine hasn't been a problem, it's a matter of firing up QEMU and compiling the packages from Unstable. Pidgin however, is throwing obscure linker errors when I try to compile it. I don't have the error readily available to me, so I decided I'd just ask here if anyone knows if it's possible to compile Pidgin 2.4.x using the toolchain and libraries in Etch (they have 2.3.1 at backports.org) or if I should just give up. If it's worth my time, though, I can post the output here and pursue it from there.

Thanks!

New X kills VTs

Mon, 05 May 2008 23:08:32 GMT

Friends,

After updating my xserver-xorg and associated packages to the newest version in testing (7.3+10), my ttys or VTs or whatever you want to call them no longer work. That is to say, a CTRL+ALT+F1 doesn't get me away from my desktop.

I'm running an ATI Radeon 9600, but using the VESA driver didn't fix the problem, so I don't think it's a driver issue.

Thoughts?

Update: Apparently something got mixed up with respect to xlibs-data/x11-kbd-utils; I was missing all of the binaries in the latter. For posterity, see this debianHELP page.

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:03:15 GMT

When running Google Earth, I get error 'Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".' scrolling down my terminal. Running nvidia chipset under Lenny, with the packages libgl1-mesa-glx, nvidia-glx, and rss-glx installed. Meanwhile, no display shows up in Google Earth - or more correctly, the "Earth" part of the display fails to show, while the controls come up just fine.

What must I do?

Aiptek Graphics tablet

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:33:53 GMT

Hi,

Does anyone have experience getting an Aiptek graphics tablet (branded Medion) running under Debian? I've followed what mixed documentation I've found, and I think it's nearly working. However despite being offered to me in GIMP, it's not doing anything, and the diagnostic gaiptek program from the driver project is complaining that "There is no Xserver Input Driver associated with the tablet".

Happy to post configs / logs if anyone here can help.

TIA.

More on "over-current change on port" poetry

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:33:47 GMT

Wanted to thank the very helpful folk here for the comments on this earlier post of mine. And probably spill some search engine juice here, for, you know, future searchers. Quite late a post, but I'm second to none in procrastinating. ;-)

Well, my problem was this, briefly: Thinkpad R51 abruptly switches itself off upon connecting an external USB disk enclosure (Tech-Com 2.5" HDD enclosure, self-powered, carton says "SSD-2501HDD" -- this is the thing), presumably to protect itself from the device drawing more current than allowed by USB specs. The seller predictably did not buy this line of thought: he tested it with his Windows XP machine, it didn't work, so he tried another enclosre and cable of the same make that worked on his machine. He absolutely refused to exchange it for another externally powered 3.5" HDD enclosure.

I took the new box home. This time the notebook did not switch itself off, but the drive could not be mounted either. So the switching off was probably due to a short either in the enclosure or cable. Anyway, this is what /proc/scsi/usb-storage/2 said:

   Host scsi2: usb-storage
       Vendor: Super Top 
      Product: USB 2.0  IDE DEVICE    
Serial Number: ??????????
     Protocol: Transparent SCSI
    Transport: Bulk
       Quirks: IGNORE_RESIDUE

This kernel ChangeLog talks of added support for supertop drives among unusual_devs. After a shiny new 2.6.24 kernel and few more recompilations to do away with the gigabytes of usb_storage logs and high CPU usage (basically disable verbose logging), I can enjoy pr0n again. :) It works with a non-Y USB cable also, so I guess it doesn't want to draw full 1 amp off two USB ports.

In other news, bug #465102 mentioned in the same post is now closed. It hasn't made into testing yet, so I haven't tried it myself.

Anomalies in apt-get

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:11:21 GMT

Here's something I've never seen before. I'm running Debian unstable and using apt-get. When trying to install a compiler tonight, I got a long list of packages to be installed and removed with a letter in braces following each package name. For example:

The following NEW packages will be installed:
  fp-compiler{a} fp-ide{a} fp-units-base{a} fp-units-db{a} fp-units-fcl{a}
  ...
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  desktop-file-utils{u} gnome-media-common{u} gnome-mime-data{u}
  ...

I don't understand why installing Free Pascal would conflict with Gnome components. I know there's a big KDE update in unstable right now, but it's not clear to me why that would affect this.

My questions:

What do the letters in braces mean?
Is the KDE update affecting everything else?

k3b issues

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:32:36 GMT

I'm running into problems running k3b. This came up all of a sudden the other day and I can't think of anything I may have done to cause it. I'm running lenny/sid, haven't updated anything in a month or so really. When I went to start k3b from menu, the splash came up, but hung at 'creating gui'. Same thing happened when run from terminal, multiple times. I managed to get it working after purging k3b and I think kdecore (I'm using fluxbox, and only have the parts of kde installed that I need to run k3b and k9copy, which I also have occasional problems with, but that's almost always been the case) then rebooting. After that it worked. Today, not working again. There's got to be something going on that can actually be fixed, instead of re-installing the damn program every time I want to use it.

Any ideas?

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 21:49:51 GMT

I feel a bit sick... you know, that feeling where you realise all of the important files on your computer have gone.

Any tips on recovery? I'm left with a random assortment of liveCDs, Windows XP (no service pack, but I could get that sorted if I begged one of my friends to torrent it for me) and... debian which doesn't work now due to the lack of contents in /home, now.

I'd really appreciate some help...

Books & magazines

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:45:24 GMT

Hey Guys/ new site of books and magazines about linux has appeared. www.dleex.com

"over-current change on port" poetry

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 16:56:25 GMT

The little 40GB disk of my Thinkpad has been overflowing with modern information technology. So I got a external USB enclosure and a 80GB disk today to safekeep all the pr0n and warez. This thing comes with a cable one end split, with two plugs there. One of them makes the computer power off abruptly, the other one fills dmesg with this wierd messages. (Same thing happened with the lonely plug end also, in case you're wondering.)

It makes the system unstable too - while composing this message with logjam, on selecting "debian" community to post, logjam and the entire GNOME desktop froze. This happened a couple of times. Rebooted, and everything works normally. So it seems. No reportbug today too, sigh.

This is Lenny, with a homemade 2.6.19.2 "pristine, official" kernel. No patches were ever applied.

On plugging:

Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: usb usb2: wakeup_rh (auto-start)
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: state 7 ports 2 chg 0000 evt 0006
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: port 1 portsc 0880,00
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: over-current change on port 1
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: trying to enable port power on non-switchable hub
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: port 2 portsc 0c80,00
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: over-current change on port 2
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: trying to enable port power on non-switchable hub
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 4-0:1.0: state 7 ports 6 chg 0000 evt 0018
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: GetStatus port 3 status 001030 POWER sig=se0 OCC OC
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 4-0:1.0: over-current change on port 3
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 4-0:1.0: trying to enable port power on non-switchable hub
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: GetStatus port 4 status 001030 POWER sig=se0 OCC OC
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 4-0:1.0: over-current change on port 4
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 4-0:1.0: trying to enable port power on non-switchable hub
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: state 7 ports 2 chg 0000 evt 0002
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: port 1 portsc 0c80,00
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: over-current change on port 1
Feb 10 21:27:11 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: trying to enable port power on non-switchable hub
Feb 10 21:27:12 tp kernel: usb usb2: suspend_rh (auto-stop)

On unplugging:

Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: usb usb2: wakeup_rh (auto-start)
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: state 7 ports 2 chg 0000 evt 0006
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: port 1 portsc 0880,00
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: over-current change on port 1
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: trying to enable port power on non-switchable hub
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: port 2 portsc 0880,00
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: over-current change on port 2
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: trying to enable port power on non-switchable hub
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: hub 4-0:1.0: state 7 ports 6 chg 0000 evt 0018
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: GetStatus port 3 status 001020 POWER sig=se0 OCC
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: hub 4-0:1.0: over-current change on port 3
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: hub 4-0:1.0: trying to enable port power on non-switchable hub
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: GetStatus port 4 status 001020 POWER sig=se0 OCC
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: hub 4-0:1.0: over-current change on port 4
Feb 10 21:27:31 tp kernel: hub 4-0:1.0: trying to enable port power on non-switchable hub
Feb 10 21:27:32 tp kernel: usb usb2: suspend_rh (auto-stop)

Any of you know what this means? If this is a hardware problem, can the software please tell the hardware not to draw so much current? If this is a software problem, will upgrading anything fix it? Do I have to return the hardware and live life sans backups, business as usual? Are we back in year 2000?

At the moment I don't have another computer and another OS to test this thing further. Of course I have been asking the Mighty Google, but it is all useless information overload there. So far.

Update:
Seems that there is something wrong with logjam, in fact: See #465102. Can anyone confirm this?

Inkscape+Kubuntu+Vinque font? (SOLVED)

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:32:32 GMT

Anyone else had trouble getting Inkscape to recognize some fonts? I really don't relish reconfiguring all 100+ objects that are labeled with this font (the file was originally made under Windows 2k on my old box). As far as I'm aware, both vinque.ttf files are named exactly the same, so that isn't the problem...

Solved: That font has the wrong permissions, at least in some downloads. chmod 644 solved it.

Update: sound issues

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 04:43:29 GMT

So I restarted my laptop, and sound appears to be working fairly smoothly. Except now I get absolutely no sound from anything Flash. No YouTube, no ABS. But my music player doesn't freak out about interruptions from IMs anymore. :-/ Why couldn't these issues happen at the end of the semester instead of the beginning?

xmms vs. totem CPU load for playing ogg vorbis files

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 22:44:28 GMT

I was monitoring CPU usage when playing the same ogg file on my system using xmms, then using totem.

I was surprised at the 10 to 1 difference in CPU load percentage as shown by top.

xmms consistently uses about 0.5% CPU on my Athlon Thunderbird 700MHz system.
Totem consistently uses about 5.0% CPU on the same system!

That's an amazing 10 to 1 difference!

Sound and lagging issues

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:10:16 GMT

First off, thanks for all the help with my wireless issue; it is resolved. (Hooray!)

New problem, however: I'm not sure what's causing it, but lately my computer has started flipping out about two programs needing to make noise at once (e.g., playing a game and I get an IM at the same time; sound hiccups/freezes like it can't figure out what to do). This is a fairly new problem, and I don't know if it's just that my sound card is going bad or what. Also, after cleaning up (read: deleting) a bunch of files, my computer's started lagging something fierce. Iceweasel has a hard time switching between tabs (especially if one of them is YouTube playing a video, in which case the sound also does the freezing thing), and in general I have a hard time switching between open windows. I don't run 30 programs at once, either; we're talking just Iceweasel and Gaim (did this with Pidgin, too, when I used it). Do I need to defrag or anything like you'd need to do in Windows? Did I miss something? I deleted the files completely, and didn't just send them to the trash.

For what it's worth, I think this could just be an issue with my computer in general being on its last legs and needing replacement, but I figured I'd ask you guys first.

Download manager with cookie support?

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 22:57:07 GMT

<Update Wed Jan 16 23:31:47 UTC 2008> It looks like d4x does have support for cookies, it's just FlashGot that's screwing up and not passing the cookie like it should. So anyone got a suggestion for a better download manager plugin for Iceweasel? :)

Ok, this is driving me nuts... for two days now I've been trying to find a download manager that actually supports cookies. A number of sites that I go to use cookies to store your login info, so when you use a downloader that doesn't use the cookies, you get no files.

So far I've tried:

Not a single one of them has support for cookies! I could probably hack in support for cookies into Gwget as it just calls wget for you (and wget supports loading cookies), but it's also the least featured of the ones I've tried. (Aria has more features, even if it does make my eyeballs bleed...)

Anyone have any other suggestions? This is driving me up a wall!

(p.s. integration with FlashGot is a plus.)

ogg files from audio CDs

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:53:33 GMT

If you like to listen to music, but do not want to carry around your compact discs, then here is a simple way to turn your songs into ogg vorbis files from Etch.

1. sudo aptitude install cdparanoia
2. sudo aptitude install vorbis-tools

Check your groups to make sure you are a member of groups cdrom and audio
Open a shell (Applications -> Debian -> XShells -> XTerm)
robert@pip:/tmp$ groups
robert dialout cdrom floppy audio video plugdev netdev powerdev

Put a music CD into your CDROM drive.
Then make sure cdparanoia can see the drive and disk.

robert@pip:/tmp$ cdparanoia -vsQ
It should spew some info about your drive and tracks on the CD.

To rip an individual track, Say track '5', then
robert@pip:/tmp$ cdparanoia -B 5

To convert the created *.wav file to ogg, then
robert@pip:/tmp$ oggenc *.wav

Now you have a ogg vorbis encoded music file, and can be played by totem, xmms, etc. (whee!)

***

I then put these files into my USB jump drive to be able to play on any PC (even in M$ media player... if you download the ogg vorbis codec into widows media player. See the 'ogg vorbis' entry in en.wikipedia.org)

For my Etch install, both totem and xmms can play the ogg files, as well as my work M$ PC (with the codec). For Christmas my wife even got me an 'Insignia' mp3 player, and it also can play ogg vorbis files.

Happy ripping and listening!