I was having a problem with my Dell Inspiron 2100’s touchpad after the upgrade to Mandrake 10.0; the touchpad worked fine when I used the 2.4 kernel, but failed to click using the 2.6 kernel. This site fixed all my problems:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/2199
I ended up just taking the easy way out and passing psmouse.proto=imps to the kernel via the boot loader.
I did some backing up before I installed the new Mandrake Linux 10.0, and I thought I’d share a bit about how to do it.
1. Blank your media:
cdrecord -v -eject speed=12 dev=0,0,0 blank=all
Optionally you can do blank=fast, but I prefer a clean sweep.
2. Create the ISO image of what you want to backup.
mkisofs -v -R -nobak -o goku.iso /home
-v for verbose, -R to preserve permissions and filename lengths in Linux, -nobak to not waste space in the backup image with those little backup files that some applications write.
3. Burn that backup image baby!
cdrecord -v -eject speed=4 dev=0,0,0 driveropts=burnfree goku.iso
That’s all there is.
*References:
Tonic for your Backup Woes: CD Backups In Linux (Part One).
Prompted by Kyle’s presentation at NBLUG on autofs; I decided to try my hand at it.
I figured the perfect task for autofs would be to automatically mount my install CDs when I needed them. For instance, when I want to install software; instead of physically loading the CD into the drive I can just hit “install” and magically have the software loaded and installed.
In a previous entry I showed how easy it was to store your install CDs as ISOs on your hard drive. From there all you need to do is edit a few configuration files to get autofs working for you.
First is /etc/auto.master which is the main configuration file for autofs. I altered the file so that there was only a single non-commented line:
/mnt/iso /etc/auto.iso –timeout=60 .
Now to create the file /etc/auto.iso, which I wrote to look like this:
mdkinstall_1 -fstype=iso9660,ro,loop :/iso/Mandrake-10.0-install_1.iso
mdkinstall_2 -fstype=iso9660,ro,loop :/iso/Mandrake-10.0-install_2.iso
mdkinstall_3 -fstype=iso9660,ro,loop :/iso/Mandrake-10.0-install_3.iso
Now whenever you try to navigate to either /mnt/iso/mdkinstall_1 , /mnt/iso/mdkinstall_2 , or /mnt/iso/mdkinstall_3 the images are automatically mounted for you and you can easily browse them.
In order to make this new magic usable by my software installation tool I updated my software sources to point to file://mnt/iso/mdkinstall_1/Mandrake/RPMS/ , file://mnt/iso/mdkinstall_2/Mandrake/RPMS2/ , and file://mnt/iso/mdkinstall_3/Mandrake/RPMS3 for “Installation CD 1″, “installation CD 2″, and “Installation CD 3″ respectively.
Now when I want to install software from the installation CDs I just fire up my install tool, select the software I want and go; no wasting time loading CDs into the tray, or even taking the time to mount the images anymore. Life is good.
I installed my newly downloaded and burned Mandrake 10.0 CDs at work today, and I wanted to update my software to get all the security updates and bug fixes. However when I tried to install the updated software I received the error that the packages I was trying to install had bad signatures.
Package signatures are a way for the users to verify that the software they are about to install has not been changed since the original developers released it. A bad signature on a package can be caused by the package being corrupted, the package being compromised by some evil doer, but the most common reason is that you don’t have the public key required to verify the package signature. In my case I had the wrong keys.
You can see what keys you have available via the command line with:
rpm -qa gpg-pubkey .
The key can be displayed on the command line with:
rpm -qi gpg-pubkey-XXXXXXXX .
Where XXXXXXXX is the key-id.
I found that these keys differed from the ones in /etc/RPM-GPG-KEYS/
After removing the old keys:
rpm -e rpm -e gpg-pubkey-22458a98-3969e7de … .
I imported the new keys:
rpm –import /etc/RPM-GPG-KEYS/*.asc .
And all was well. Now I can install packages from Mandrake and not have to worry about the dreaded bad signatures error.
* Sources: This link helped me get going.
The best way to download Mandrake is with BitTorrent; which allows you to download from multiple peers at the same time, and share the bits that you have with others as well.
To do this on Linux (or any other OS) you first need to locate the torrent file. The Mandrake 10.0 Official torrent can be found here. Just save it to your your local machine, or copy the URL, which you can later paste into your BitTorrent client.
I used the command line version of BitTorrent, however there are graphical clients as well. Navigate to where you want the downloaded images to be stored, then from the command line type:
btdownloadcurses.py Mandrakelinux-10.0-Official-Download.torrent
The client will start up and show you how much and at what rate you are downloading and uploading. It is very exciting to watch your bits fly out and know you are helping someone else download the same thing you want. To participate fully you do need to open a few ports up in your firewall (or router). See here for how to get that working (very easy). After the download has completed you can keep the program running and you will continue to upload bits to others.
Once you have the images downloaded to your hard drive you will want to burn them to CD. If you are on Windows, then Mandrake has some simple documentation on how to burn the images to disc, see here. I will show how I did it from the command line on Linux. Again there are graphical clients available, but this was the fastest way to do it for me.
First you will need to find out where the tool thinks your CD burner is, so at the command line type:
cdrecord -scanbus
For me the result was something like this:
scsibus0:
0,0,0 0) ‘PLEXTOR ‘ ‘CD-R PX-W4012A’ ‘1.02′ Removable CD-ROM
I am the cautious type, so before burning the image I did a dry run:
cdrecord -v -dev=0,0,0 -dummy -speed=40 driveropts=burnfree Mandrakelinux10.0-Official-Download-CD1.i586.iso
Note the -dummy flag. Also this assumes you are in the directory where the images are currently located.
When you are ready for the real thing pop a blank CD-R into your CD burner. Navigate to where the CD images are on your hard drive, and then from the command line type:
cdrecord -v -dev=0,0,0 -speed=40 driveropts=burnfree Mandrakelinux10.0-Official-Download-CD3.i586.iso
There you go. Do that for each of the three images and then you will be ready to install Mandrake Linux 10.0 .
This site has a few recent mozilla builds (Linux) with real nice fonts.
I attended the Linux World Expo this year at Moscone in S.F. . There seemed to be fewer vendors then last year, and I didn’t really care to try too hard to get any shwag. I did pick up a demo copy of Astaro Secure Linux V4 which looks like a neat little product I will want to try out at work.
The real disappointment of Linux World this year though was the total lack of open and free wireless access points. I know I wasn’t the only geek searching in vein for an open AP to check my email, or coordinate with other people I knew at the expo. I even would have paid for it if there was good coverage, and I could get some descent bandwidth. It was kind of sad that if I wanted a descent wireless connection I would have had to have gone around the corner to the Starbucks.
