Problems


Blank screen on start up with laptop that have intel card inside


Yet another problem with pulse

 $aplay -l
 card 1: XFi [Creative X-Fi], device 0: X-Fi 20k1 [WaveOut/WaveIn]
   Subdevices: 7/8
 load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:1,0
 load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:1,0

Get rid of the spammers without the unuseable web interface method to delete users from phpbb forum

 su postgres
 psql forum
 delete from phpbb_users where username!='Wolli Kaulard' and username!='Michael Foerster';
 select username from phpbb_users;

network interface has not the name you want it to

Suppose we want rename interface eth1 to eth2.

Since udev had its way into SUSE Linux, network interface names are chosen dynamically by udev and not statically any more, as it was with older versions. In some situations, you'd want to force the network interface name (e.g. eth0, eth1) though, and it's not much of an easy task of finding how to do that.

/usr/share/doc/packages/sysconfig/README.Persistent_Interface_Names provides a rather detailed explanation of how it works, but unfortunately doesn't give any examples. So to those who aren't udev wizards (i.e. almost everyone on this planet), here's an example of what to write in /etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules:

 SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:04:23:a7:bf:f4", IMPORT="/sbin/rename_netiface %k eth0"
 SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0b:db:83:84:b0", IMPORT="/sbin/rename_netiface %k eth2"

First, you need to find out the hardware (a.k.a. MAC) address of the network interface you want to name explicitely. You might want to use /sbin/ip address list to help you with that, e.g.:

 1: lo: mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
 2: eth0: mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:04:23:a7:bf:f4 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 161.90.174.152/23 brd 161.90.175.255 scope global eth0
 3: eth1: mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:0b:db:83:84:b0 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Once you have identified the correct network interface name (which is still the one you'd like to rename), take note of it's hardware address (in the example above, it's 00:04:23:a7:bf:f4 for eth0). Then, go ahead and add a line as above (SUBSYSTEM...) in /etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules, obviously putting the proper hardware address behind SYSFS{address}==. The value of IMPORT is what's executed by udev and while the first parameter to /sbin/rename_netiface is a placeholder (%k), the second one is the desired network interface name.

Actually, the example above will rename the network interface eth1 into eth2 (for the NIC with the hardware address 00:0b:db:83:84:b0).

Thanks to Loki who posted that in Blog.


gnu mailman cannot be configured by web interface

I had a redirection in apache configuration files for all cgi-bin addresses to a specific url since there was a server domain move. The configuration of mailman can be viewed but it does not take the changed values.

The solution was that the redirection chunks the POST request to apache web server.

i810 intel graphic driver does not work since hardy upgrade

skype is not working

Pulseaudio Alsa Ubuntu 8.10

After I tried a pre-upgrade for Hardy I have lost sound completly. Then I have done some work with https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio and nasty hours later I finally found that the pulseaudio take a alsa device but the analog one and not my default digital output. After uncommenting in /etc/pulseaudio/default.pa

 load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,1
 load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0,1

I hear sound again. A test with

 speaker-test -Dpulse -c6 -l1 -twav

gives not the correct speaker order but for now I am fine.


CUDA 1.1 on ubuntu

show if /usr/include/GL has the correct 755 permissions. At first my directory has 700 and gcc could not open it :-(
 ls -ld /usr/include/GL
 rwx______ GL
 chmod 755 GL

audio adjustments under xfce4 do not work

see http://wiki.xfce.org/de/faq for explanations.

open-mpi installation ok but running an application is only with root possible


virtual box usb problem on ubuntu gutsy

see http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/747


laptop booting some special scripts

If you want to adjust the properties dependent of where you are it is useful to start some scripts at bootup before starting gnome desktop manager gdm. For example to change one or two desktop configuration or switch between network settings. To run them I call them in /etc/rc.local but the problem was that they start together with the terminal tty1. So I turned tty1 of. In ubuntu 7.10 it is only necessary to delete tty1 in /etc/events.d. Other distributions search with

 grep /sbin/getty * -r

to find the configuration file of tty1.


debian etch install cd boots up the install program but while hardware detection it crashs

All tries with kernel parameter like ide=nodma or acpi=off etc fails. Then I found the solution to boot up until the install program starts. Then turn to console 2 with ctrl-F2 and type:

 $ grep using_dma settings
 using_dma      1       0       1       rw
shows that dma is enabled (first column)

Then type:

 cd /proc/ide/hd[a-z]
 echo -n "using_dma:0" > settings
turns off dma

kernel compilation fails

boot message:

 device-mapper: table: 254:2 ... dm-linear: Device lookup failed

Solution: Under "Raid and LVM" unmark the "device mapper". It was not necessary for my machine.


Installing sun studio which is free for linux. Used distribution is UBUNTU 7.10

 ./installer
gives many exceptions

The error is because the installer assumes rpm installation. So install that by

 apt-get install rpm 

or together with alien to convert later some rpm to deb files:

 apt-get install alien

Then rpm binary lies under /usr/bin/rpm but the sun installer assumes it under /bin

 sudo ln -s /usr/bin/rpm /bin/rpm

and start it again.


VDR has old channels.conf

see here.

VDR isn't running and in /etc/syslog you find repeated messages about "restarting vdr"

The problem seams to be one of a wrong set of charset. I wrote my own init.d starting script and now the vdr run. The entries are almost default because I find them anywhere in the help files.

 #! /bin/bash
 #
 # vdr start-stop script
 #
 LANGUAGE=C
 LC_CTYPE=$LANGUAGE
 LANG=$LANGUAGE
 LC_ALL=$LANG
 LC_MESSAGES=$LANG
 LC_CTYPE=$LANG

 env LANG=C LC_TYPE=C vdr 
-v /var/lib/video.00
-c /var/lib/vdr/
-L /usr/lib/vdr/plugins
-r /usr/lib/vdr/vdr-recordingaction
-s /usr/lib/vdr/vdr-shutdown-message
-E /var/cache/vdr/epg.data
-u vdr
-g /tmp --port 2001
-w 60 < /dev/tty8 &