polywogsys

OK, So to put it simply, upgrading to Fedora 9 was one of the worst things I could have done. I want my KDE 3.5 back! First off, let me itemize the issues...

1) WTF is up with focus-follows-mouse crashing all of KDE? With focus follows mouse, I have to login with XFCE or on console and rm -rf "~/.kde" to be able to bring it up again. Did anyone test this?
2) WHY OH WHY do my desktop icons come back AFTER I DELETE THEM?
3) WHY OH WHY does my entire system GRIND TO A HALT when I attempt to move a window, or bring a backgrounded window to the foreground?
4) Moving around the K menu is awkward, particularly when you have a lot of menu items.
5a) The task bar takes up too much real estate, and
5b) when you try to minimize the size, none of the system tray icons, or the clock change size... they just get clipped.
6) Oh, and speaking of icons reappearing, WHERE ARE THE ICONS for most of my items?  Many show up with a question mark.
7) When I close a window, half the time there's a staticy digitital artifact white shadow left where the window once was.
8) I turn off sounds for Konsole, and the sounds are still there.
9) I turn off sounds for ALL of KDE by "using system bell instead of notifications"... the sounds are still there
10) I tried to switch themes, and ... it hung kwin (or something did)

4.0.5 a release?? It's not even a release candidate, maybe, maybe in some alternate universe it's what microsoft just released and the Vista UI is a linux desktop environment.

I have been using XFCE since moving to Fedora 9. Everytime I cool down, and my aggravation ebbs, I fire up KDE again, "just to see."

For the love of dog-spelled-backwards, can anyone tell me how to get any sort of WPA working with Linux?

• Cisco Aironet AIR-PCM352
• Lucent Technologies Orinoco Gold (P/N 014916/B)

I have tried almost everything out there. I have gotten a lot farther with the Cisco card, but it seems like no one merged the WPA crypto code into the kernel. At least dmesg tells me that "air(): WPA supported" otherwise, I'd be trying to update the firmware, and waste more of my own time.

I have ordered two 80gb caviar se SATA disks to run as a raid mirror. Just in case this thing is on its last leg. That means this weekend, it's going to be FUN FUN FUN... doing nothing but upgrading the OS and replacing drives. Woohoo.
By the way, did I mention how far Bochshas come?! It's actually usable to boot an OS... slow as balls, but gets the job done... I want to try minix3 on it as soon as it's done downloading... but am way too tired.

I was about to note that my mom was diagnosed with high cholesterol, even though she doesn't eat... let alone eat saturated fats... and my grandmother had it as well...
BUT

Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel: ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel: ata1.00: BMDMA stat 0x64
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel: ata1.00: cmd ca/00:30:d5:31:17/00:00:00:00:00/e1 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 24576 out
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel:          res 51/84:01:04:32:17/00:00:00:00:00/e1 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel: ata1: soft resetting port
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel: ata1.00: Host Protected Area detected:
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel:     current size: 156250000 sectors
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel:     native size: 156368016 sectors
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel: ata1.00: Host Protected Area detected:
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel:     current size: 156250000 sectors
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel:     native size: 156368016 sectors
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel: ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel: ata1: EH complete
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 156250000 512-byte hardware sectors (80000 MB)
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
Jun  4 10:25:35 moz kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
Jun  4 10:39:02 moz smartd[2775]: Device: /dev/sda, ATA error count increased from 94 to 95

These errors have become more and more prevalent. In fact, I am getting two of these each day now. :-\

So, I ran a "yum update" on my work box today, and I noticed that when the kernel RPM was installed, kernel-2.6.23.15-80.fc7, mkinitrd gave the following errors:

/sbin/mkinitrd: line 173: 22918 Segmentation fault      $ldso --verify $bin > /dev/null 2>&1

About 80 lines of it! Running mkinitrd manually causes the same issue. I don't quite know what's happening. This is Fedora 7.

#mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.23.15-80.fc7.img 2.6.23.15-80.fc7
/sbin/mkinitrd: line 173: 22918 Segmentation fault      $ldso --verify $bin > /dev/null 2>&1
/sbin/mkinitrd: line 173: 22919 Segmentation fault      $ldso --verify $bin > /dev/null 2>&1
/sbin/mkinitrd: line 173: 22987 Segmentation fault      $ldso --verify $bin > /dev/null 2>&1
/sbin/mkinitrd: line 173: 22988 Segmentation fault      $ldso --verify $bin > /dev/null 2>&1

Create a keyfile. This could be anything (i.e.: dd'ing /dev/urandom would work, or an mp3 file, etc.)

truecrypt --keyfile-create asdf.key --random-source /dev/urandom

The following creats a 1 Mb normal (not hidden) unformatted volume encrypted with AES, and RIPEMD-160 hash. It uses /dev/urandom for the random number generator. It will display the primary and secondary volume keys after creating the encrypted volume using the keyfile asdf.key. The file it creates is called asdf.tc.

truecrypt --size=1M --type normal --filesystem none \
 --hash RIPEMD-160 --encryption AES --random-source /dev/urandom --display-keys \
 -k ./asdf.key -c ./asdf.tc

Map the volume, but don't mount it. This way we can format the volume whatever format we want. In our case Ext2.

truecrypt -k asdf2.key asdf.tc

Find out what our 'raw' device name is: /dev/mapper/truecrypt??

truecrypt -vl

Format that raw device

sudo /sbin/mke2fs /dev/mapper/truecrypt1

Unmap the volume

truecrypt -d

Mount the volume.

truecrypt -k asdf2.key asdf.tc /mnt/floppy/

Unmap/Unmount all volumes

truecrypt -d

In order to get the files you need for making any module but more specifically TrueCrypt module working (assuming that you are using the Fedora 7 stock, or updated, Kernel): http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc6.html#kernelsrc
There are 3 basic steps involved in installing the kernel source.
1. Download the desired kernel source (matching your current kernel if required)
sudo yum install yum-utils
yumdownloader --source kernel
2. Installing the SRC.RPM package
sudo rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.23.1-21.fc7.src.rpm
3. Using rpmbuild to prepare the source into a usable state
sudo rpmbuild -bp --target=$(uname -m) /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/kernel-2.6.spec

Now, it's ready for the truecrypt part.

4. Edit truecrypt's truecrypt-4.3a-source-code/Linux/build.sh file to point to a different KERNEL_SRC:
KERNEL_SRC=/usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel-2.6.23/linux-2.6.23.i686
5. Edit line 659 of truecrypt-4.3a-source-code/Linux/Kernel/Dm-target.c to comment out the last "NULL" argument to kmem_cache_create. It should read: bio_ctx_cache = kmem_cache_create ("truecrypt-bioctx", sizeof (struct bio_ctx), 0, 0, NULL/*, NULL */);

But alas!!
# modprobe truecrypt
FATAL: Error inserting truecrypt (/lib/modules/2.6.23.1-21.fc7/extra/truecrypt.ko): Invalid module format

So I did a 'dmesg' and the error was: truecrypt: version magic '2.6.23.1-21.fc7 SMP mod_unload PENTIUM4 4KSTACKS ' should be '2.6.23.1-21.fc7 SMP mod_unload 686 4KSTACKS '

This is because even though I downloaded and configured the kernel sources (above). It still "looked" at kernel-devel for the kernel config etc. It so happened that when I ran make config in /usr/src/kernels/2.6.23.1-21.fc7 i changed the processor type to Pentium4. Not knowing what else I had changed, I decided to uninstall/reinstall "kernel-devel". When I rebuilt it, and modprobed truecrypt it worked fine.

Autoindent based on syntax, tabstop to 4 spaces instead of 8 (default), and use spaces instead of the TAB character (TAB is default).

To make permanent, edit ~/.vimrc and put this in it:

set autoindent
set tabstop=4
set expandtab

Then ":retab" to reformat a file with the new settings. http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=12

Assuming you want to dump the filesystem to a remote server (with more space):

dump -0f - /dev/hda3 | ssh recioe@remote.backup.server "cat - > kriukis-dev_hda3.dump"

If you want to be able to remotely start programs on a linux box via an ssh tunnel, you need to have some x11 programs installed. On a minimal install of CentOS 5, hardened with mostly everything removed, I needed to install xorg-x11-xauth (

yum install xorg-x11-xauth

).

Basically, I logged in remote and enabled the X11Forwarding feature of sshd. But I still wouldn't get my $DISPLAY set. Manually setting it wouldn't work either. After installing xauth and re-logging in to the remote box, the $DISPLAY was set correctly to "localhost:10" for the SSH tunnel. I tested it with "xlsclients", which properly showed my active programs.

If you get caught in a bind, and have to restore from tape to a machine with slightly different HD configs (i.e.: no raid, or change in layout for fdisk) you'll need to edit the initrd from the restored image file:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=111565
- to do so, edit the "init" file in the initrd.
- That's where the editting of the init script and rebuilding the initrd comes in.
The one you've got was probably built for you as part of the anaconda installation process. If your initrd script is called /boot/initrd-xxxxxxxxx.img, then you can unpack it with:
mkdir /tmp/initrd
cd /tmp/initrd
gzip -cd /boot/initrd-xxxxxxxxx.img | cpio -imd --quiet
then edit the init file at /tmp/initrd/init to change the entry with the old swap partition, then pack it up again with:
cd /tmp/initrd
find . | cpio -co | gzip -9 > /boot/initrd-xxxxxxxxx.img

http://www.builderau.com.au/program/linux/soa/10-shortcuts-to-master-bash/0,339028299,339279043,00.htm