[Wolves] Re: Wolves digest, Vol 1 #61 - 4 msgs

[Simon Howes]

When my T3 is active I will download RedHat.  I might as well start
downloading it now on my ADSL.

And cheers for your help.  Need any help with Windows then ask me.  Its what
I do most of my time.  :)


-----
Simon "howesey" Howes

PR Manager
www.blargoc.co.uk


----- Original Message -----
From: <wolves-request@mailman.lug.org.uk>
To: <wolves@mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Sunday, November 03, 2002 12:00 PM
Subject: Wolves digest, Vol 1 #61 - 4 msgs


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> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re: Mandrake and me. (=?iso-8859-1?q?Adam=20Sweet?=)
>    2. A2RT event in november (Steve)
>    3. artwork:network project (Steve)
>    4. Evening (Matt Wright)
>
> --__--__--
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2002 13:02:24 +0000 (GMT)
> From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Adam=20Sweet?= <drinky76@yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wolves] Mandrake and me.
> To: wolves@mailman.lug.org.uk
> Reply-To: wolves@mailman.lug.org.uk
>
> To be honest there's no hard and fast answer to this
> one. Or if there is, I don't know it. Basically it
> sounds that all of this restarting is screwing the
> filesystem and things are starting to drop out. Don't
> know much about this stuff, but what filesystem are
> you using?
> If its Ext3, ReiserFS or one of the other journalling
> ones, they should be resistent to this to some extent,
> but not failproof. Ext2 DOES NOT like this sort of
> thing at all as it does not keep a transaction
> journal. And you will get the 'root filesystem
> uncleanly mounted, check forced' business which takes
> an age and this restarting will start eating your FS
> after a few times.
> There are several things I can advise you on, but I'm
> no expert and I horrify some the wiser members of this
> group with my naive methods, but:
>
> 1) In an emergency, you can use CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to
> kill X, it will then restart and give you an X login
> window. If it dumps you at a prompt, login and type
> startx. That will restart X for you.
> 2) Use a journalled filesystem. I'm sure Mandrake does
> by default, but the control centre should tell you.
> Ext3 seems to be the most popular at the mo, I don't
> really know the merits of any one over the other, but
> Ext3 seems a good one.
> 3) If a program freezes in X, theres a program called
> xkill that will help. Either find it on the menu or
> open a terminal emulator like konsole and type it. You
> will get a kind of skull and crossbones mouse pointer.
> The next thing you click will get killed. I add the
> application launcher applet on my KDE kicker for such
> events so I can run xkill.
> 4) You can use ALT-F1 to F6 (CTRL-ALT-F1 to F6 in KDE)
> to open alternative virtual terminal, F7 is always the
> X terminal. From either a terminal emulator or a
> virtual terminal, you can run ps -aux which will list
> all of the current running processes. The command kill
> followed by the process number (under the heading pid)
> will kill that process. ie
> bash prompt> ps -aux
> <list of processes>
> bash prompt> kill 1793
>
> will list all of the processes and then will the kill
> process with the number 1793.
> NOTE - you can only kill processes that are running
> under your own user ID, so root can kill anyones
> processes (I think) but Bob can only kill Bob's
> processes. I don't recommend fiddling with this as
> root if you don't know what you're doing.
>
> As a general note, the famed stability of Linux is
> founded on the strength of the kernel, the mission
> critical apps like Apache and mail servers etc and the
> networking stuff. Some desktop apps can be a bit flaky
> and unpredictable, they are getting better though. To
> be honest I used Mandrake for about 2 years and it
> p*ssed me off with such problems and I moved onto Red
> Hat and then Debian and found them far better. I
> remember Lee asking what everyone thought of the new
> Mandrake 8.2 and I was in a mood anyway and ranted
> about it's desktop flakiness.
> Don't let this put you off, it gets better. Maybe try
> Red Hat or SuSE if you get chance.
> A final consideration is that possibly, X doesn't like
> your graphics card very much, but I think this is a
> long shot as it wouldn't work at all.
>
> As a side note, such questions may get overlooked by
> people as there is no specific answer and it would
> require getting elbow deep in program guts to find the
> answer and a lot of people don't have time to do that.
> Please don't take this as a sign of ignorance, people
> tend not to answer questions they don't know or don't
> have time to answer as explained at:
>
> http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#id2840347
>
> I don't mean to suggest your question was not very
> good by any means, it's perfectly valid, I'm just
> explaining why people may not answer you. As for me,
> I've been exactly where you are and I know how it
> feels not to get the answer you are looking for. All I
> can say is persevere, ultimately you may never know,
> but you will move on, get better and use different
> distros or versions thereof and this will just go
> away.
> Best of luck :)
> Adam
>
> =====
> http://www.drinky.org.uk
>
> ======================================
>
> Use Linux. Because it's better.