Slackware :: 12.2 Deletes All /dev/fd?u* Floppy Special Files On Boot?
Nov 15, 2009
Slackware 12.2 has the unkind habit of deleting all the /dev/fd?u* floppy special files upon boot-up. I have to make another directory (I use /floppy) to contain these files so I don't have to keep copying them from an earlier distribution (12.1) Now, for example, to format a 1743 kilobyte floppy, I do fdformat /floppy/fd0u1743 mformat a:If I copy these special files to /dev (where they belong) then some part of Slackware Linux 12.2 deletes the special files when I power down and power up the machine.Slackware 12.1 and earlier leave floppy special files severely alone upon shutdown/startup.I cannot seem to "grep" a reference to /dev/fd anywhere in /etc/rc.d or its subdirectories. Why is Slackware 12.2 deleting them?
I have an external 500gb usb drive with a bootable full install of slackware 12.2, and it also contains all the sets, patches, and extras for 12.2 in /usr/src, along with some other non slackware packages, like gparted, and I use it for rescue, backup, installation, etc.I used this disk with no errors, setting up 12.2 on my mother's dell, a pentium 4.However, my mom has an older gateway as well (a pentium 2) that she keeps around because it has M$ Publisher on it, and sometimes a student emails her a Publisher document, and she has to use her old sluggish beast to open it up.
I have not found an open source solution to open Publisher docs in Linux, so I have been trying to follow http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows to migrate the her xp installation on her old box to a vdi to use with virtualbox.My first obstacle is that the cd drive in the old machine is non-functioning. My second obstacle is that her machine dates back to the days before the bios supported booting from usb.
I have never had the time to mess with network booting, and don't know how to set up a bootp server, so sticking with what I know, I thought I could install lilo on a floppy, and have it configured to boot my external usb. Originally, lilo was installed on the mbr of the usb, but for this project, I went ahead, using the pentium 4, and reinstalled the lilo boot loader on a floppy. I did this by mounting my external usb drive (which shows up as /dev/sda) and then binding /sys, /proc, and /dev to it, and chrooting into the external usb install. Then I modified lilo.conf and reran lilo. It worked, and now the external hard drive only boots on the pentium 4 when I have the floppy inserted into /dev/fd0. However, when I plug the external drive into the pentium 2's usb, and insert the floppy and try to boot, it never makes it to the lilo prompt, and just displays 10 lines of L 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07..The boot order is correctly set in bios to try the floppy first. I thought I might have problems with the smp kernel on such an old system, and thought I might have to go back to huge.s, but I'm not even making it to the prompt...
I've noticed since upgrading to Maverick that nautilus has become very buggy and crashes quite a bit (I've noticed it tends to happen during multiple file transfers but really it happens often and not only because of transfers).
While I've been able to tolerate this crashiness, today I came across a problem that is very distressing. If I have two files in a folder and I rename one so that it has the same filename as the other, nautilus does not display an error message. Instead what seems to happen is that it retains one file and deletes the other permanently (There seems to be nothing in the trash as far as I can tell).
Has anyone come across this error before? If you have, I'd really appreciate any advice on how to fix it.
I built a script that downloads my podcasts using Gpodder into the directory /HOME/SHARED/PODCASTS/ (with a subdirectory for each podcast)The script then selects the latest episode and copies it over to a target directory (it empies the target directory first and copies over everything) I want to use RSYNC to make sure the 'not so fresh' episodes get deleted and the "fresh" episodes get copied over. Then dropbox can sync the "new" files over to the cloud where i can access them via my ipad/iphone (whole other story).The thing is : i've replaced the cp command with the RSYNC command and now the script is acting strangely.
It selects and sync's over the "newest" podcasts to the destination directory. Then it suddenly DELETES all the episodes in the destination directory and copies over the three last files.
I have some developers with Desktop User accounts. How can I allow them to delete files owned by www-data which are created under their accounts (/home/username/public_html) by PHP scripts they are coding and testing.I tried to edit www-data user group and add the user as a member of it but this has no effect - the user still unable to delete these files only by creating another PHP script!
the script should take as input in the begginig the username of the user and then deletes all the files and folders from the user in every place he has them. script must also check if the parameters have been given correctly (only one and that one must be a username) Doesnt all the files of a user exist on a folder with his name? what if i delete this folder? Will something like this work?
Quote:
E_NOARGS=65 if [ -z "$1" ] # Exit if no argument given. then echo "Usage: `basename $0` directory-to-copy-to"
I have deleted sda1, sda2 as they were XP partitions that I no longer wanted to use (yay!). After doing so, when I rebooted I just got a blinking cursor. I was able to boot with the Ubuntu 9.10 install CD, and found that I could elect to boot from the first hard drive, and in doing so the usual grub menu was displayed, and I could boot to my Ubuntu 9.10 partition (sda5 inside of sda3 extended partition). So, noobid that I am, I figured I would try to 'fix' grub. ran commands grub>root (hd0,4); grub> setup(hd0)
Now, when I reboot, it goes directly to the grub command line, no multiboot menu, and I cannot find a way to boot to my Ubuntu partition. The partition is still there, though, as I've checked from the Ubuntu CD.
Each time I boot into Windows 7 on my dual-boot setup (the other OS being Ubuntu Maverick), the computer is no longer able to boot. I can use Windows fine that once, but after shutting down and restarting it simply loops during boot in the pattern OEM screen, power off, power on, OEM screen, power off, power on... you get the idea.
I have read that this is due to Windows (or a program inside Windows) "fixing" the Master boot record (MBR) each time it loads - and in doing so, deleting GRUB. Thing is: on my other laptop the exact same dual-boot setup works fine. My problem laptop is a Samsung R780. My guess is that it's a specific program on my laptop, as oppose to Windows in general, which is doing it, so I was hoping that you could help me either identify the problem program or secure the MBR against Windows writing to it (if that is possible).
I can, of course, fix GRUB each individual time it is destroyed by installing it again using the Ubuntu live CD, but this is obviously not a permenant solution as, upon the next boot of Windows, it is destroyed again.
I'm installing Slackware 13.1 on a Samsung N150 netbook and am stuck trying to make the special keys do their normal functions when using a virtual terminal, that is not under X. Under X + Xfce it can be done via Menu->Settings->Keyboard->"Application Shortcuts".
In essence the question is how to make a special key (example Fn+Up to increase screen brightness) run a command in the background.
Changed title and text to make clear that the command should not run in a virtual terminal but while the display is being used for a virtual terminal, that is after Ctrl+Alt+F2 for example.
Newbie here. I'm thinking about going from Ubuntu to Slackware and I just saw on Wikipedia that there is a number of projects that maintain GNOME binaries especially for Slack. So that made me wonder, why is that needed? What if I download a bare version of Slack and then build the standard GNOME version from source? Would that produce problems?
Is there something weird about the FLOPPY DRIVE on F12? Nothing associated with it works & I can't get an icon for it. Also the FLOPPY FORMATTER no longer works. (mine is an internal drive)- I had some really miner quirks with it in 10 but it worked. I had some workaround launchers that I used until an upgrade semi-fixed it. (It would give a false error that it couldn't run but did. I just ignored it.)
I tried to edit FSTAB to cure a problem of my BACKUP drive showing up twice*** so while I was in there I added the stuff for the floppy & it still doesn't work. If I try to mount it manually, I get the error that /dev/fd0 doesn't exist.I tried to find some info on it & it SEEMS that there MAY be a bug but I'm not sure as the info is a bit confusing as to just what version & such they are talking about. And there was also the problem that all the stuff seemed to be OLD or not related to my problem.I why I quite hacking at my system, is that all my workaround launchers & the formatter say that there are GNOME things missing & they can't run. So I figure that there is something missing or screwy already & that I'd better ask BEFORE I make things worse or actually break something.With the fact that floppies are about gone, it's getting to be not that big of a deal but I still find myself having to use them for repair purposes (albeit, not as much) & it gets to be a bit of a pain to fire up M$ just to do something like this.
*** It appears that the one in FSTAB was the one I needed, so where would the OTHER one be so I can get rid of it? Or at least make it auto mount.
I am having a Promise TX4650 RAID controller & trying to create a driver floppy for installing the drivers. Also am using RHEL 5, I can create the driver floppy, but when I type "mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy" I get error: "mount: mount point /media/floppy does not exist".Can I get the files in a format other than the ext2 floppy image, so that we do not need to use a floppy drive?There is a readme file inside the driver archive & you can use that as a reference.
I want to archive all .ctl files in a folder, recursively.tar -cf ctlfiles.tar `find /home/db -name "*.ctl" -print`The error message :tar: Removing leading `/' from member namestar: /home/db/dunn/j: Cannot stat: No such file or directorytar: 74.ctl: Cannot stat:No such file or directoryI have these files: /home/db/dunn/j 74.ctl and j 75. Notice the extra space. What if the files have other special characters? How do I archive these files recursively?
I'm in the process of moving /tmp out of the root filesystem to it's own (larger) partition. From a LiveCD I've:
1. Created the new part (ext4 format and is /dev/sda4) 2. Mounted the installed OS root filesystem (/dev/sda1) as /slash 3. Mounted /dev/sda4 as /newtmp 4. Using gksudo nautilus I'm trying to copy the contents of /slash/tmp to /newtmp
I have 4 files that won't copy - returning the error "Can't copy special files". These are related to ORBit it seems:
[code]...
Questions are: a. Will GDM or ORBit fail if I start up without these? b. Or will they just be recreated on the fly if found to be missing? c. What's the best way to proceed?
error message:Unable to scan Floppy Drive for media changes Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
I made a duplicate of a Centos 5.5 system disk with dump (dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb). No device files for sdb were created, but I guess that's not too surprising. I rebooted, and the device files were created. But how would I create them if I wanted to avoid the reboot? I looked around for info on mknod and MAKEDEV but didn't find a lot.
I am trying to make small kernel. I have written many programs and produce many .bin and .o files but what I want that to load every file from a specific location in specific sectors but don't know how to do that in linux , in dos same can be done by debug command.If It is not possible to achieve the specific location criterion please tell me how can I just copy many files serially to a floppy image.I have another question that if files are copied in floppy. How could I know in which sector the file has been loaded in floppy so that I can retrieve them by BIOS interrupt INT13.
I have about 300 files that need renaming, because the file system does not display the French characters properly. The dodgy letter in question has been replaced by a "question mark in a black diamond" symbol.No way of renaming, other then using mv in the Konsole has worked. Is there any way, script or program out there, that will do a batch rename?
/media/A and /media/B should be identical, but I want to confirm before deleting one.
Duplicate file finders don't work, because they'll find two copies of the same file within B, for instance. I only want to confirm that every file in one is identical to the other.
diff -qr /media/A/ /media/B/ seems to work, but the output is cluttered with garbage like
diff: /media/A//etc/alternatives/ControlPanel: No such file or directory
and
File /media/A//dev/tty8 is a character special file while file /media/B//dev/tty8 is a character special file
I can suppress the former with 2> /dev/null, but I don't know about the latter.
rsync -avn /media/A/ /media/B/ also produces a bunch of clutter, like "skipping non-regular file".
How can I compare the two trees and just make sure that all the real files exist in both and are identical?
My system has a 3-1/2 floppy drive. I do not know how to open it to copy files to a CD. My system knows itis there since booting with a data floppy gives a non system disk error. nce in Ubuntu, the floppy drive does not appear in "places computer".ince I am completely new to this system, I do not know how to proceed
I've been considering erasing Windows off my hard disk to gain some space, but until then, I want to know that I can do everything I'll want to do.
I've followed many tutorials and threads on the internet, but they never work for me. I added several files to a floppy in Windows, and the floppy works fine in all the Windows computers I've tried. However, when I boot into Ubuntu 10.04, I click on the Floppy Drive in nautilus, but it says "Unable to mount location. No media in drive." From the terminal, it seems that I can mount the floppy (no error message, and the floppy drive clicks), but when I navigate to a folder in /mnt or /media, the folder is empty.
I am dragging my files over to a new Fedora 12 installation and I just noticed that special characters are not taken into account when sorting files by name (I want '_js' to come before 'images').Is there a way to make the sorting process behave like Windows, where files starting with a special character are listed first?
I have several (small) bootable linux distros on USB sticks, and I would like to use them on several computers, some of which do not have USB boot support. Many of these also do not have a CD drive.In order to get around this problem I would like to create a bootable floppy disk that can load the system from the USB stick (similar to http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/i.../Boot_Floppies). I have found quite a few floppy images on the internet (like the one above), but I haven't yet got one that works and boots the USB sticks that I have (i.e. one that can boot Tiny Core).Is this actually possible (it seems to be, but I haven't got it to work yet) and does anyone know how I can do it?
I was wondering if anyone has a floppy image, or something similar that can help me boot my USB.My plan is to have Fedora LiveUSB on my USB... and whenever I need to help someone, or have to use a computer, I can easily pop in my usb, and run Fedora. One problem I've had is that some of my friends have older pcs, and also some of the computers at college are older.I heard that it is possible to force a usb to boot on a motherboard that doesn't support usb boot. I think it has something to do with installing grub on the floppy, and somehow making it install or run usb drivers. (Not entirely sure)One alternative to this that I came up with was to use one of those business card CD's, but apparently the size is too small(at least in the one's I've seen). Not only that, but I can't find them anywhere.
My computer doesn't support booting from a cd or a usb stick. I managed to install ubuntu (10.04) by using the utility program that came with the live cd. With it I was able to boot from cd and use the live cd., there still seems to be some leftover files of windows in the hard drive where I installed ubuntu. So my question is, how can I reinstall ubuntu so that it will format the whole drive. Is there perhaps a similar utility program for ubuntu that lets me boot from a live cd or can I do the reinstallation just using the already installed ubuntu?
