August 2013 - luv-main

Happy 20th birthday Debian!
by Aníbal Monsalve Salazar 16 Aug '13

16 Aug '13

Happy 20th birthday Debian! http://bits.debian.org/2013/08/20-birthday-debian.html

1 0

Re: Grub failure, Debian 7.0.0 install
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 16 Aug '13

16 Aug '13

Thanks for both of the replies! Craig Sanders said, >if the article is recommending dselect then it's years out of date. >it was good in its day, but it really wasn't designed to cope with >30,000+ packages - it just takes too long to make your selections. >IMO, the same applies to aptitude but the user-interface is a lot >easier, and the dependancy/conflict resolution works better. I prefer the way it works particularly on how it displays dependencies. I find uisng dselect and dpkg I can get exactly what I want, something I found impossible with aptitude. I do not use synaptic as last time a tried it it used the gnome libraries, and I do not have these on my system. I use the great and as yet unsurpassed fvwm for a window manager. >rather than select them manually, you can create a list of packages >to install and use 'dpkg --set-selection' to select them. 'apt-get >dist-upgrade' will then install them all. I have tried this I found it works OK copying an existing Debian version, ie say 6.0.6 to 6.0.6 but failed somehow between major versions 5.0 to 6.0. From memory it did no get all the packages due to name changes, one then had go through the system in fine detail to work out what was missing, as major debian version changes are rare the time taken to manually select packages is not an issue after all it only has to be done once no matter how many systems one has. Another __very__ important aspect is it allows one time to go through all the packages to see what neat new items have been included. in amongst those 30,000 odd packages there are some __real__ gems hidden. The phrase "One can't see the forest for the trees" pops to mind. Using Linux know for over 20 years, Lindsay

4 3

Re: Grub failure, Debian 7.0.0 install
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 14 Aug '13

14 Aug '13

Thanks for the replies, the post was in frustation that the install was not doing what I wished and then failed. Telling someelse of a problem clears ones perspective in a wonderfull fashion though. The artical point out by Daniel explains __everything__ relatively clearly. Just to explain I always install Debian the same way, in expert mode. initialy only the base packages are installed and the system rebooted (if possible, I have had failures before here). I have never used "task select"! The next step depends on if it is new version of debian, in that case individual packages are selected using "dselect" after setting "install-recomends"and "install-sugests" to false (in apt.conf). I have a standard (rather odd) setup with regards to selected packages, this step usually takes around 3 to 4 hours. If the install is of an existing debian version, the package selections are transfered after the base install from one of my other systems using the method described in the handbook. Using this an entire personalised install can be acheived in way under an hour. I will consider my next step, I will do another base package install of 7.0.0 and install lilo by hand, I may though have two goes as the procedure is trivial and see of I can find out what went wrong with grub, it was installed, the relevent files all existed in /boot. Lindsay

3 2

Re: Grub failure, Debian 7.0.0 install
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 13 Aug '13

13 Aug '13

Success!! Install worked OK on the text menu installing lilo, previous attempt was with the graphical menu, the only boot option with the graphical menu being grub the install of which failed. Did not try another graphical install attempt so have no idea where the problem lies. Lindsay

1 0

Grub failure, Debian 7.0.0 install
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 13 Aug '13

13 Aug '13

I have just tried an install with the DVD's kindly sent to me a little while back and on reboot after the install no boot loader is present although grub was selected. I have no experience with grub at all, lilo being my main stay. I may say I am very biased here I greatly dislike these so called "inteligent" programs with almost no config available, great when they work but a total pain as now as there appears to be no way to recover from the situation. I followed the screens on the install, it did not ask the id of the boot disk (as the lilo install does) and it certainly did not find it as the mbr still has the lilo 1st stage loader on it. Does the grub install work on debian 7.0.0...............help!!!!!!!! Is it possible to reinstall/install grub from the rescue prompt? How does one tell it which is the hard disk with the systems mbr on it? Just in case the system is a newish Gigabyte X79-UD5 mb, I have not set it up with the efi boot system (or whatever they call the new boot system). On the install the grub install did complain no efi partition was avaible, the previous debian/windows XP install using lilo did work OK, I assume grub should also work OK under the same circumstances. Lindsay

2 1

Getting started with ZFS
by Colin Fee 10 Aug '13

10 Aug '13

Last night after some updates on my media server, one of the disks in a mirror set failed a SMART check and was kicked out (fortunately I have good backups). It's failing on the bad sector count but I haven't done a deeper analysis yet. However it's time to bite the bullet and do some upgrade work. I'm intending to replace all of the disks with larger ones to increase the storage size and when I do, use ZFS. The box is based around a Gigabyte GA-880GM-USB3 mobo, with an AMD Phenom II X6 1055T cpu and buckets of RAM and the OS on a 240Gb SSD. So I'm looking for a strategy re the implementation of ZFS. I can install up to 4 SATA disks onto the mobo (5 in total with one slot used by the SSD) -- Colin Fee tfeccles(a)gmail.com

12 49

3D printing talk at LUV
by Lev Lafayette 08 Aug '13

08 Aug '13

Hi everyone, For those who were at the meeting on Tuesday night, a number of people took a couple of snapshots. If you could send me a copy (to me, not the list), it would be appreciated. Bernard, the speaker, would like to include them on a 'blog post. Thanks! -- Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), GCertPM, MBA mobile: 0432 255 208 RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt

1 0

Korean before tomorrows LUV meeting?
by Chris Samuel 05 Aug '13

05 Aug '13

Hi folks, If anyone is interested I'm going to meet some of the VPAC folks for Korean at 5:45pm at Big Mama's restaurant on Swanston St just up from Victoria St, opposite the old CUB site. cheers, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC

1 0

Is there a meeting tomorrow?
by Duncan Roe 04 Aug '13

04 Aug '13

No email on luv-announce, nothing on the web site. What's happening? Cheers ... Duncan. -- Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

1 0

BTRFS errors
by Russell Coker 04 Aug '13

04 Aug '13

Aug 4 19:21:36 server kernel: [1634894.027985] btrfs read error corrected: ino 8403 off 41730048 (dev /dev/sdd1 sector 46841264) Aug 4 19:21:36 server kernel: [1634894.053482] btrfs read error corrected: ino 8403 off 47702016 (dev /dev/sdd1 sector 46852928) Above is a sample of the error log from a system with a defective SATA disk. It's the same defective SATA disk that I discussed previously in regard to ZFS errors. I believe that ZFS is deficient in that it doesn't provide similar log messages. For test purposes I created a RAID-1 array over two partitions on the same disk. To test it I'm making a backup of one of my servers because it's the backup is a reasonable amount of data and yet another backup of the server is always a good thing. It's unfortunate that btrfs seems to offer no way of getting a count of the number of errors from the filesystem that were fixed during normal operation (as opposed to errors fixed during a scrub). I'll suggest this on the mailing list. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

1 0