A taste of Linux.

Recently two drives on the computer got confused and started spilling out error messages when I rebooted. Eventually I tracked it down to this;-

fsck ext3. no such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hdf1. The syperblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem and not swap or ufs or something else, then the superblock is corrupt and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock

The exact message that was being shown at the start of this saga was

buffer i/o error on device hda1, logical block 0

and then the logical block would increase by one until I switched the machine off. This was looking serious so I started asking questions in the forums and chatrooms in irc and came across RIP [Recovery Is Possible]. but to recover a hard drive I'd need a new one to recover onto, so off I toddled to get one.

Back home and thinking about it, I'd better partition this drive before I use it, so into the machine it went and I loaded up knoppix, set the root password,and then formatted it using gparted. Came out of knoppix which had now done its job and went back into RIP. Both drives were unmounted and i was able to use ddrescue to copy information off the dodgy disk onto a brand new disk.

It was rather scary doing it, but having done it successfully once I feel confident about doing it for the other three drives in the box, once I've got the new hard drives that is :).

Recently I had a hard drive die on me, I knew it was dead but I still went ahead and rebooted. Which meant of course that when it appeared in fstab it immeditaley threw the machine into a tizzie. So i tried 'emacs /etc/fstab' from the command line but only got a read-only version, and I got the same when I tried using vim. So I was scuppered.

I tried using knoppix as a live distro to enable me to edit fstab but it couldn't see inside my lvm drives.

And then I found my centos 5.0 installation disk and was able to gain access to fstab via Linux Rescue, using the mantra of 'mount/sysimage/etc/fstab'. Then it was easy to just comment out the relevant line and then save and reboot. But to the centos developers, please, don't put light grey writing on a black background, its virtually unreadable! To read it I had to turn off the main light and read it just with the back light screen monitor.

Today I've been playing around with irssi and getting that up and running. First problem was that it wasn't installed but that was easily rectified. Then to find a theme that I liked which was different from the default theme, which had pale purple writing on a dark purple background to the bars at the top and bottom of the irssi program. The combination of colours I found was totally unreadable, so the need was rather urgent. On the irssi website [http://www.irssi.org/] I looked in the themes folder until I found one that I liked, eventually plumping for the 'spring.theme'. And then goltor over on #gllug was talking me and Peter through getting it all set up and running, suggested that we download and use 'adv_windowlist.pl' from http://tenr.de/misc/misc.php?a=misc and save it into irssi/scripts/autorun/ ready to run next time we started irssi. So I /quit irssi and then restarted it, joined freenode by using the /server freenode command and then once that had joined I put in /join #gllug and then a couple of other channels that I wanted too. To swap between the windows just use the ALT+number key. And thats about as far as I've got in running irssi at the moment.

Seeing in my rss feed that OpenOffice.org had released version 2.3.0 this morning I hurried to get it. Downloading from the OO.o website led me to the version that I was already using, so I followed the link in my distrowatch feed to the new download. Once I'd got it and untarred the file I saw the familiar fold of rpms which I was able to install using Clive-H's familiar incantation. And then I found a problem.

Whenever I clicked my menu item for OpenOffice I got the 2.2 version.So how to change it? I couldn't access the menu editor because the panels were locked, so the obvious answer was to unlock the panels and then to click on the link to the menu editor. Again find my link to OpenOffice writer and just change its link from '2.2' to '2.3', save everything and then it all worked okay again, and i was able to load OpenOffice.org 2.3.0. I then had to accept the terms as usual before writer came up with its familiar screen, and I was in business and ready to play.

I have some problem where xmms just chases its tail through its play list when run as user, but works admirably when run under root, which isn't ideal. So I've been looking for another music player and I've tried out Rhythmbox, which at first didn't work because I didn't have the right codecs for it. It turns out that you also need these 'gstreamer-plugins-ugly' and also 'gstreamer-plugins-bad' from the rpmforge repo [and their dependencies obtainable using yum] and then just let her rip. It does need some minor tweaks to its preferences to get it to index your music collection the way that you want, but then it just works fine. And if it does crash for whatever reason a 'Bug-collector' window appears asking you to submit details of what happened and what you were doing at the time. Whether you submit your crash report is entirely your own decision, as you can just close it and no further action is taken.

After some further fiddling I've solved the xmms problem by renaming its folder [.xmms] in the home folder to .xxmms and then restarting xmms. This forces it to recreate its preferences and resets it all, and gets rid of its irritating behaviour of tail chasing :). Once its working properly you can delete .xxmms as its of no further use.

Ever since I upgraded to Centos 5 I've been having problems with the Openoffice.org 2.2 I'd installed from binaries. Every time that I went to open a file in it it opened a 'Filter Selection' box and refused to open my file, which could be opened perfectly easily using OOo1.5 from Centos. That way I knew that the problem lay with OOo2.2 rather than the files themselves. So I went on #openoffice.org on freenode and asked there, and two people attempted to help me sort it all out. Eventually it was concluded that I'd found some rare bug which didn't easily manifest itself as no-one else had reported this problem.

So I asked on #gllug [Greater London Linux Users Group] and clive-h gave me a lot of help and advice, most of which didn't work until Clive-h suggested 'rpm -ivh --force --nodeps openoffice.org*.rpm' which I was reluctant to do as I've never forced an install before, but nothing else had worked. So I did it and it worked, OOo2.2 was now opening files that it couldn't or wouldn't open before. All kudos to Clive-h! The only thing that I can think of about the previous incarnation of OOo2.2 was that it was an incomplete installation, and thats why the force had worked.

On my shiny new CentOS 5 I do have one slight problem ... when I log on and startx has run I get this error message "cannot open theme file /usr/share/apps/kdm/themes/RHEL". I then have to click the OK button with my mouse before I get a login box for my user name and password. So I checked and there is no RHEL folder and only a circles and a Bluecurve folder. So I went onto the #centos channel on IRC [Internet relay chat] and asked about it.

it turns out that I needed to alter usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc, and the line that has to be changed is Theme=/usr/share/apps/kdm/themes/RHEL and I changed it to 'circles' and then rebooted. And I was able to log out properly which was another of my problems. When the login screen reappeared after my reboot there was a big flower and two boxes requesting my login details, it was working! Once in I went back to the above mentioned file and changed the theme to 'Bluecurve' and logged out, to be met with two login boxes in a more official looking blue background, which is what I prefer. Another problem solved :)

I was recently asked, in a roundabout way, whats in my user crontab so this is my 'user' crontab file;-
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
# (/tmp/croninit installed on Mon Feb 23 12:02:14 2004)
# (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp $)
# Min Hour DoM Month DoW Command
MAILTO="boztu"
LANG="en_GB"
0 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23 * * * /home/boztu/programs/eggdrop/iceni.botchk
#0 * * * * /home/boztu/foldingathome/folding status 1 >/opt/logwatch/folding.txt
#* */12 * * * /home/boztu/chk_pending.sh >/opt/logwatch/pending.txt
#@reboot /home/boztu/reboot.sh
#0 7 * * * /home/boztu/backup.sh 0
#0 */6 * * * /home/boztu/backup.sh 1
30 4 * * */3 /usr/bin/sa-learn --ham --mbox /home/boztu/Mail/inbox-mbox
30 4 * * */3 /usr/bin/sa-learn --spam --mbox /home/boztu/Mail/SPAM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
from which you can see that I run an eggdrop bot which is checked every hour to see if its running, and if not to start it up.
And that every 3 days I run spamassassin learn on my spam mailbox.

On the second Friday of each month, Kent lug will be holding a social meeting at the 'British Queen' near to Square Hill Road in Maidstone[http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=576737&y=155704&z=0&ar=Y]. We will be meeting in the back room [outside if the weather is nice enough] where its possible to have a conversation without being drowned out by others, and neither being kippered by the smokers.

Our March meeting was very pleasant with good food reasonably priced and good beer also at a reasonable price. The conversation ranged over favourite distro, and favourite editor, to the Reiser murder case and the quality of the beer! And as its a Shepherd Neame pub the beer quality was high!

A quick straw poll indicated that we've now found our social meeting 'home' and this is where we'll be meeting for the foreseeable future.

My local LUG [Kent Linux Users Group] is holding a social meeting on the second Friday of each month at the 'Society Rooms', which is a Wetherspoons pub right next to the Maidstone East railway station, starting at 1930. If you intend to come and visit us, please wear something geeky so that we'll recognise you. I intend to wear my RedHat hat.

On the fourth Friday of each month we're holding a social meeting in Canterbury at the 'Old Bev', Canterbury [come out of the west station as if you've just arrived from Maidstone, turn left, go 100m, on the left is a footpath signposted "university" and "whitstable, follow that, go under the bridge, keep following the path straight, you then come out at a small monument/green and on your left is the Old Bev pub]. Same time different place.