earth tech

Used the instructions as shown for KNOPPIX v5.1.1 excepting only that I found no /cdrom directory on KNOPPIX v6.0.1. Used the /mnt-system directory instead as that appeared to be where the CD was mounted (according to df -h).

Testing Pendrive boot of KNOPPIX v6.0.1 this time 2009-09-07 EST 22:25.

Labels: 0x0000, knoppix, linux, pendrive, usb, v6.0.1, x86

posted by pd wilson   #   01:24

Posting this from a disc-less host, using a KNOPPIX V6.0.1 LiveCD downloaded to the Vista host using BitTorrent / BitComet.

This KNOPPIX disc divined the correct network configuration from the USR5430 Ethernet / WiFi bridge, which is configured as part of an AdHoc wireless (802.11) LAN which has an Internet backhaul (configured using ICS) over a Cricket CDMA USB BroadBand modem on the Vista box.

The KNOPPIX network configuration routine psychically determined all that and configured it without having to ask me any stupid questions. That, all by itself, is freaking amazing. Contrast it, for instance, with DamnSmallLinux (DSL) [v?] which I just argued with all weekend about the identical configuration. The DSL solution required adding a eth0:1 interface as root to begin with – it got worse from there. …

So it just booted up and ran without question, so far pretty much everything working, it appears.

Notable Factoids

• no spkrs on this box, so not sure about sound
• spell checker in Iceweasel is set for German
• Iceweasel is the default browser
• Iceweasel comes with the NoScript plugin already installed (!!!)
• a /slick/ new [to me] desktop environment called ‘Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment’ (LXDE) - really nice

Oddities

Is it true that USB devices only boot if they are formated FAT/32? Some weirdness going on there. If TRUE, I could put my PortableApps and my KNOPPIX on the same 4G USB stick? Maybe?

Glitches

For some reason, the 2nd & 3rd times I tried to boot this CD on this box, it hung during the X11 initialization - I believe(d) that some BIOS changes I made may have affected this, so the current settings changed are:

• Legacy USB support: enabled
• Startup Diagnostics screen: disabled

These settings may not matter, or may be specific to this system. They are recorded here so I can refer to them later, if necessary ;)

The hanging of the X11 startup is critical, since the system will shut itself down when X11 exits, and I was unable to find a way to interrupt the shutdown from the console during the time the X server was running. This means that if X hangs on this CD, the system shuts down after a short timeout.

Out of 4 boot-up attempts, the two that have worked (first and fourth) were both simple "put the CD in and hard boot w/o going to setup or boot-device select menu" sequences.

Video Resolution Bug

The screen resolution only seems to go up to 800x600. This has to be an incorrectly selected video device driver, since this same video card will go up to 1600x1200 and has done so in the past.

Labels: 0x0000, iceweasel, knoppix, linux, lxde, network, pendrive, usb, v6.0.1, x86

posted by pd wilson   #   21:22

There is a problem - as mentioned previously - with the default Debian-blows-goats install. For whatever reason, the system refuses to mount a USB mass-storage device when it is connected - that is, the Debian-POS system neither automounts the new storage device, nor will it allow either root or any loggeg-in use to mount it, despite the appropriate entries in /etc/fstab and the expected messges in /var/log/messges.

The forum thread /dev/sda1 missing [now closed] at LinuxForums describes the problem, some attempts at solutions, and some "workarounds" (see our post Found a workaround, maybe...) in detail, but the information we're posting here is not there [or if it is, it's in another thread and we didn't find it], and since the thread is "closed" we are posting it here...

Basically, the solution is very straight-forward: Install the udev package.

While that sounds straight-forward, Debian-blows-dogs-for-quarters has [again] gone out of their way to make the administrators life as difficult as possible by making sure that there is no apparent way to navigate to 'stable' distro from the 'untable' distro, and furthermore there is no clea way to select which Debian-POS distro you want to get .deb packages from. There appears to be no way to do a substring match when seraching packages. And there seems no way to either know which distro (eg.. 'stable', 'unstable', etc) the packages installed on a given machine came from, either.

And now IceWeasel-POS is crashing - randomly deleting characters from the textarea on blogger.com, and taking a good .7sec per charcteer typed to echo the characters typed - andddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd this with dysfunctional spell checking! Also, as you can see, the IceWeasel-POS is repeating characters and words randomly when blogger does its autosave operation.

So this is like : I'm typing a sentence, then stopping and waiting fffffffffffffffffffffffor the words to appeare. - and when they do- the repeats.

We have [sort of] found a solution. Note that in the log below, the 'apt-get install udev' command output is from the second run of same command. Ran it, then ran it again. Not sure why, but it worked.

root@juggalo:/dev# apt-get install udev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  bluez-bcm203x hotplug
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  udev
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 2 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 263kB of archives.
After unpacking 471kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
Get:1 http://ftp.de.debian.org stable/main udev 0.105-4 [263kB]
Fetched 263kB in 1s (183kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 139905 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing bluez-bcm203x ...
dpkg: hotplug: dependency problems, but removing anyway as you request:
 atmel-firmware depends on udev (>= 0.070-3) | hotplug (>= 0.0.20040329-12); however:
  Package udev is not installed.
  Package hotplug is to be removed.
Removing hotplug ...
Selecting previously deselected package udev.
(Reading database ... 139875 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking udev (from .../archives/udev_0.105-4_i386.deb) ...

**************************************************************
* Please purge the hotplug package!
* (/etc/init.d/hotplug has been found on this system)
**************************************************************

Setting up udev (0.105-4) ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/init.d/udev ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/links.conf ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/persistent-input.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/persistent.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/cd-aliases-generator.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/udev.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/devfs.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/hotplug.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/permissions.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/persistent-net-generator.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/scsi_id.config ...

Note that it is not clear how or why bluez-bcm203x hotplug got installed - it was not requested or wanted, as this machine has no Bluetooth devices, and probably never will.

Other notes of note:

• The udev package was already installed, but wasn't working right.
• The installed version of udev did not include the documentation that was [according to the Debian udev package description] supposed to exist in /usr/share/udev/
• As with so many other Debian-POS commands, there was no man page installed, despite the fact that 'apropos udev' showed a number of [non-existent] man pages for the command. This seems to be a pervasive problem with this particular Debian-lies-like-a-whore distro - many [we're inclined to say "most" actually] of the administrative manual pages are notably missing, even though 'apropos' claims they are there - perhaps there is some issue with the configuration of the 'makewhatis' cron job on Debian-blows? Why would these man pages be left out? And if they are going to be left out, why lie about it through apropos?

So yes, we seem to have fixed this problem, but Debian still sux0r.

Labels: auto-mount, debian, linux, sux, sux0r, udev, usb

posted by pd wilson   #   08:54