Discussion:
Update on Debian workstation...
(too old to reply)
Dave Laird
2005-01-22 03:40:55 UTC
Permalink
Good evening, everyone...

I have begun the migration of some of my data files, particularly some of
the scripts I have written for MySQL and various database files over to
the Debian box despite the fact it is desperately short on memory and
other resources. The reason I am doing this is essentially to see how well
Debian-KDE wears under a fairly heavy load, because regardless of which
hardware platform I use, KDE has always been working at maximum capability
for over five years, now.

One of my really big questions is in RedHat of all flavors, there is an
rc.local file that is loaded at the very end, after all the other services
have loaded. I could perhaps plug some of the functions and aliases I call
from rc.local on a RedHat box in rc.S, couldn't I? Other than this minor
bit of business, I really *like* the way the runlevels are handled in
Debian much better than the sometimes difficult scripts in Mandrake and
RedHat.

I *finally* got the KDE Kontact running, at last, but through a very
serpentine route, because in the beginning, all it did was crash, crash,
crash, each time complaining bitterly that it couldn't find a valid
socket. However, I did notice that each time I started it and thusB locked
up
my system, more of its icons (really cools ones, much better than
Mandrake) and functions appeared on the screen. Finally, I sat there
doggedly restarting it about four times until everything came up and
functioned as it does in Mandrake and RedHat. It's a FUNKY way of getting
Kontact to work, but at least now it works and is stable under all kinds
of conditions.

Don't go too far from your computer, James. Jack-in-the-Cave heard me
talking about Debian this morning over coffee, and he is champing at the
bit to get started on a Debian box of his own. Mind you, Jack is not your
basic end-user, but he is very knowledgeable and intuitive about how to
get things done in Mandrake. He has been using Mandrake, more or less
under my tutelage, for over a year now, and handles his accounting
(Moneydance), mail (kmail) and news (pan) all from within KDE. You might
help me break him in to Debian Linux, in particular tell what you know of
its history and how it compares to the "other brands". 8-)

I *did* manage to get my favorite editor, Jed, up and running with inline
spell checking and the screen that I designed that closely resembles
Wordperfect 5.1, right down to some of the keystroke commands. I've tried
all the various editors, and still Jed is my hands-down favorite. I use vi
for anything that is allergic to embedded spaces or other glitches, but I
use Jed for nearly all the various writing projects I do each day.

I've still got a lot of fine-tuning to do, yet, but as soon as I get this
box stable where I want it, I will begin building an archive of Sarge and
burn the CD's to the entire set. Then I will make a master backup of my
Mandrake boxen, and it will eventually become Debian, I think. Debian uses
so much less memory it makes such a decision easy. This old clunker box I
am working on for the last few days would *never* run Mandrake with all
the applications I have running at present. It would crash and burn with
Open Office and Kontact both running at the same time, but here I am
tonight, with both loaded and active. <laughing to myself> Never let it be
said that my final decision has been made, but I am *impressed* with how
much I can do with XWindows and Debian compared directly to Mandrake.

After all, when it comes to a workstation, that's all I want. A little GUI
to make me think I'm still stupid enough to run Windoze, but a busy cron
and various other tools and ointments all running in the background,
allowing me all kinds of freedom. Toss in a little bit of IPTables to make
sure nobody can get to my workstation, and you've got it.

For a first run, this one has been utterly fascinating!

Dave
--
Dave Laird (***@kharma.net)
The Used Kharma Lot
Web Page: http://www.kharma.net updated 11/24/2004
Usenet news server : news://news.kharma.net

Fortune Random Thought For the Minute
Darling: the popular form of address used in speaking to a member of the
opposite sex whose name you cannot at the moment remember.
-- Oliver Herford
James Vahn
2005-01-21 14:33:47 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dave Laird
One of my really big questions is in RedHat of all flavors, there is an
rc.local file that is loaded at the very end, after all the other services
have loaded. I could perhaps plug some of the functions and aliases I call
from rc.local on a RedHat box in rc.S, couldn't I?
Bash aliases and functions should be in /etc/profile and I think /etc/rc.S
has disappeared in favor of etc/rcS.d/, for single user mode:

"The scripts in this directory are executed once when booting the system,
even when booting directly into single user mode. The files are all symbolic
links, the real files are located in /etc/init.d/ . For a more general
discussion of this technique, see /etc/init.d/README."
Post by Dave Laird
I *finally* got the KDE Kontact running, at last, but through a very
serpentine route, because in the beginning, all it did was crash, crash,
crash, each time complaining bitterly that it couldn't find a valid
socket. However, I did notice that each time I started it and thusB locked
up my system, more of its icons (really cools ones, much better than
Mandrake) and functions appeared on the screen.
Sounds odd. Might be one of those KDE2.x --> 3.x anomolies. Quit KDE,
delete the related files in /var/tmp and the .Xauthority, .DCOP*, and
.ICEauthority files in your $HOME directory. Restart KDE and try again.

Sometimes ~/.local and ~/.font need to go too.


The log file will grow immensely in time, edit /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc
to set a loglevel of 0 :

exec /usr/bin/X11/X -dpi 100 -logverbose 0 -nolisten tcp

and you might want to experiment with the "nice" setting in
/etc/X11/Xwrapper.conf that defaults to -10.. try -5 on low power boxes.



--
Dave Laird
2005-01-22 13:05:40 UTC
Permalink
Good morning, James....
Post by James Vahn
Sounds odd. Might be one of those KDE2.x --> 3.x anomolies. Quit KDE,
delete the related files in /var/tmp and the .Xauthority, .DCOP*, and
.ICEauthority files in your $HOME directory. Restart KDE and try again.
That's what cured the problem. 8-) I learned that trick from running
Mandrake with a badly anemic box with 256M of memory on a Pentium 90. Yew...

Dave
--
Dave Laird (***@kharma.net)
The Used Kharma Lot
Web Page: http://www.kharma.net updated 11/24/2004
Usenet news server : news://news.kharma.net

Fortune Random Thought For the Minute
"It was a virgin forest, a place where the Hand of Man had never set foot."
James Vahn
2005-01-22 14:48:44 UTC
Permalink
Dave tells me that Debian runs fast it should scream on my hardware.
I have a AMD Athlon 3200+ runing on a Asus K8V Deluxe montherboard with
1 gig of memory. Also have 4ea sata 80 gig hard drives I would like to
go RAID 0 & 1...
The only screaming I've heard from Debian was when someone wanted to
package the "hot-babe" CPU load indicator.

http://lwn.net/Articles/113644/

--
Jack Garrett
2005-01-22 17:58:28 UTC
Permalink
Post by James Vahn
Dave tells me that Debian runs fast it should scream on my hardware.
I have a AMD Athlon 3200+ runing on a Asus K8V Deluxe montherboard with
1 gig of memory. Also have 4ea sata 80 gig hard drives I would like to
go RAID 0 & 1...
The only screaming I've heard from Debian was when someone wanted to
package the "hot-babe" CPU load indicator.
One question will accounting program MoneyDance work with Debian I am
se it will but just asking???
Jack
Post by James Vahn
http://lwn.net/Articles/113644/
--
One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor...
is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics.
-- N. Wiener

Jack in the cave
Jack Garrett
Dave Laird
2005-01-23 01:48:25 UTC
Permalink
Good evening, James...
Post by Jack Garrett
One question will accounting program MoneyDance work with Debian I am
se it will but just asking???
It's not a Debian package (probably licensing issues) but I have it here
under /usr/local/bin and it *runs* although I've never actually used it.
Apparently MoneyDance is a java application. I'm not very familiar with
java, but apparently the Sun license precludes it from being part of the
Debian archives. I use the blackdown version, j2re1.4, via this URI for
deb ftp://ftp.oleane.net/pub/java-linux/debian/ unstable non-free
but various Debian packages want sun-java, and I don't know the URI.
apt-get install j2re1.4
Hehehe... I'll tell you a dirty trick I just discovered yesterday, and it
never crossed my mind until I read what you had to say about Java. If you
do an apt-get install OpenOffice guess what? Because Open Office is so
Java dependent for most of its database stuff, it downloads the JRE as a
dependency. Now there's something not even Mandrake thought to do. They
let you download Open Office, install it, and THEN tell you it needs Sun's
Java in order to have full functionality.

You have to meddle with applications that need JRE, by pointing them to
the appropriate libraries, but it works. S'amazing.

Dave
--
Dave Laird (***@kharma.net)
The Used Kharma Lot
Web Page: http://www.kharma.net updated 11/24/2004
Usenet news server : news://news.kharma.net

Fortune Random Thought For the Minute
The greatest productive force is human selfishness.
-- Robert Heinlein
James Vahn
2005-01-23 04:24:55 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dave Laird
Hehehe... I'll tell you a dirty trick I just discovered yesterday, and it
never crossed my mind until I read what you had to say about Java. If you
do an apt-get install OpenOffice guess what?
It provides a /usr/bin/java ? I installed Blackdown Java in order
to make the online games at yahoo.com work - a 25 meg package.
Can konqueror use openoffice's /usr/bin/java like that too?


--
Dave Laird
2005-01-23 12:01:45 UTC
Permalink
Good morning, James...
Post by James Vahn
Post by Dave Laird
Hehehe... I'll tell you a dirty trick I just discovered yesterday, and it
never crossed my mind until I read what you had to say about Java. If you
do an apt-get install OpenOffice guess what?
It provides a /usr/bin/java ? I installed Blackdown Java in order
to make the online games at yahoo.com work - a 25 meg package.
Can konqueror use openoffice's /usr/bin/java like that too?
I *think* that's what I did, as I certainly don't recall downloading Java
directly, but when I installed Mozilla and went to check the weather
radar, Java was working. ;-)

Dave
--
Dave Laird (***@kharma.net)
The Used Kharma Lot
Web Page: http://www.kharma.net updated 11/24/2004
Usenet news server : news://news.kharma.net

Fortune Random Thought For the Minute
Mencken and Nathan's Second Law of The Average American:
All the postmasters in small towns read all the postcards.
James Vahn
2005-01-23 16:20:34 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dave Laird
Post by James Vahn
It provides a /usr/bin/java ?
I *think* that's what I did, as I certainly don't recall downloading Java
directly, but when I installed Mozilla and went to check the weather
radar, Java was working. ;-)
Java, or javascript? Do you have a /usr/bin/java? The reason I'm asking
is that it gets right to the root of what Debian is all about, and you
asked me to compare Debian to other distributions for Jack. Here we are,
looking it right in the eye. It's all about freedom.

Debian has rules against software that is closed source or has licensing
problems. Java and Shockwave Flash are two common examples that cannot be
part of the Debian archives. Instead, packages will use scripts to download
and install these things from sites outside of Debian.Org ..

Most likely openoffice used such a script, although by Debian's own
reasoning openoffice should be in contrib if it depends on non-free
software, but it's in main for some reason. Maybe we're just seeing the
beginning of the fallout from Sun's effort to reign in the Java licensing
terms.

The problem I had with Java:

Depends: sun-j2re1.4 but it is not installable

So where is it? I quit looking after I stumbled across the Blackdown deb's
that solved my immediate concerns by using the search engines at:

http://packages.debian.org
http://apt-get.org

The latter will point you to unreliable servers, so be warned. Search
it for "xorg" and see what that site says now... :(


--

Loading...