This article is a good read if you access Windows/DOS drives from Linux. The author explains how to access those drives, as well as some of the restrictions and problems when using vfat drives.
NTFS is also an option of course, but as Linux only has read-only access to that, vfat is a better solution if you want to share files between the two operating systems. Pity it’s so slow and has so many restrictions. 🙁
There’s also a warning contained within: if you’re using a Linux 2.4 kernel, be wary if you have vfat partitions over 130GB in size. You will lose data. This problem was solved in the now widely available 2.6 kernel.
Tag Archives: Linux
Looking good: Monitor calibration under X
This is a surprise to me, this article describes Monitor calibration in X. I haven’t looked at calibrating my monitor but it’s something useful I must try later.
Postgrey – Postfix Greylisting Policy Server
Greylisting is an anti-spam and virus measure you can use on your mail servers. When a remote server connects for the first time it’s automatically disconnected and can’t connect for a set time limit (default is 5 minutes). If it’s a real mail server it should keep trying to deliver the mail but viruses and spam will more than likely be stopped cold.
Postgrey is a greylisting server for Postfix that Colm Buckley installed on the machine that runs linux.ie
On Debian, it’s as easy as apt-get install postgrey but then you have to configure Postfix to use it:
Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and modify the line that starts with:
smtpd_client_restrictions = ...
and add inet:127.0.0.1:60000 to the end of it.
Now, you probably want to enable white listing of clients too so edit /etc/default/postgrey and change so it looks like this:
POSTGREY_OPTS="--inet=127.0.0.1:60000 --delay=300 --auto-whitelist-clients"
You might want to add the IP range for your local network to /etc/postgrey/whitelist_clients so they’re not greylisted:
/^192\.168\.1\..*/ does the job for my situation I think.
Now, restart Postfix and Postgrey and you should see the following message appear in /var/log/mail.info:
Client host rejected: Greylisted for 300 seconds (see http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/postgrey/help)
If you don’t, it’s not working!
Much later… It’s been active for about 20 hours now and I’ve only received about 10 spams, down from well over 200 usually! The delay in delivery is annoying, but it’s something we can hopefully live with!
ATI Cards and Corrupted Text
This is new to me, but according to these setup tips my “Fixed Frequency Monitor” can’t handle the frequencies bandied about by my new ATI graphics card. It’s mildly annoying and sounds like a bit of a cop out as I haven’t seen anything similar on lower end cards!
When you’re in DOS mode or text mode and If you notice slight flickering around some characters, particularly “r”, then this could be the problem. The only solution is to upgrade your monitor or shut your eyes until you boot into a graphical GUI!
I wonder if that explains the following strange character corruption that appears during bootup:
Oh, Debian testing detects SATA drives without a hitch. 🙂
Later… Even in the GUI there’s corruption. Does this happen to other Radeon 9×00 users? The multi-colour lines in the image below appear randomly but seems to be worse when high-contrast web pages are displayed. This happens when using either the proprietary driver from ATI or the open source one in XFree86. Time to get on to Elara again.
Later Still… Opinion on #linux on irc.linux.ie is that the graphics card is damaged as 6 others who have ATI Radeon 9000 series cards have had no problems. I faxed them a return form 20 minutes ago and am waiting a response now.
Can I run Windows viruses in Linux?
It’s almost possible, but the results in this article on running Windows viruses with Wine are disappointing. There are problems but things are improving so Linux users can enjoy all the benefits of Windows!
It just isn’t fair that Windows users get all the viruses. I mean really, shouldn’t Linux users be in on the fun as well? Well… thanks to the folks running the Wine project, Linux users can “catch the virus bug” too — sort of.
F-Spot – Picasa like application for .net, mono and Linux
Liam’s going on again about how great the combination of “picasa + hello + blogger + ftp” are on IRC but unfortunately Picasa is a Win32 application so it’s not something on my radar.
He says that F-Spot is a similar application, developed using Mono so it’ll probably make it’s way to Windows .net too.
If you want to install it on Debian Testing you’ll need to install the unstable port using the following:
Add “unstable” to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ftp.somehost.com/debian/ unstable main
Then edit /etc/apt/preferences and set the “pin priority” of unstable lower than testing. This means that “testing” packages will be installed before “unstable” ones.
Add these lines to /etc/apt/preferences:
Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 650
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 600
Thanks Niall for that last bit!
Now, install f-spot:
# apt-get -t unstable install f-spot
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
binfmt-support libgconf-cil libglade-cil
libglib-cil libgnome-cil libgnomedb2-3
libgnomedb2-common libgtk-cil
libicu28 libmono0 libsqlite0
mono-assemblies-base mono-common mono-jit
Recommended packages:
icu mono-assemblies-arch
The following NEW packages will be installed:
binfmt-support f-spot libgconf-cil
libglade-cil libglib-cil libgnome-cil
libgnomedb2-3 libgnomedb2-common
libgtk-cil libicu28 libmono0 libsqlite0
mono-assemblies-base mono-common mono-jit
0 upgraded, 15 newly installed, 0 to remove and 377 not upgraded.
Need to get 20.7MB of archives.
After unpacking 59.2MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
F-Spot is an application designed to provide personal photo management to the GNOME desktop. Features include import, export, printing and advanced sorting of digital images.
Gimp, Wine and Photoshop Plugins
I’ve known for a while that it’s possible to run FFI Photoshop plugins but there are problems getting 8bf plugins working. pspi.exe can be used to run them if you’re running Windows GIMP but not in Linux unfortunately. This discussion on the Wine list suggests that a mini-wine loader such as is used by Mplayer might go some way to achieving this goal but such a loader doesn’t exist yet.
That’s a pity as this virtual photographer plugin looks nice. All the effects can be done manually in the GIMP too but why not take a shortcut if it’s there?
"Switch Users" – Gnome Style
Bug 79842 – (FS VFAT)Strange error (Stale NFS file handle) using VFAT partition
I came across this bug ages ago on my RedHat systems and several times in the past week.
$ cd /mnt/dos/photos
$ du -csh
du: fts_read failed: Stale NFS file handle
Segmentation fault
$ ls
ls: .: Stale NFS file handle
Here’s a detailed RedHat bug report where Alan Cox supplied a fix way back in May this year. Why the 2.4 kernel in Debian Linux still shows this bug happening is a mystery to me!
I do have 2.6 installed as well but I had to drop to 2.4 to burn some CDs. I can’t remember if I saw this happening there too.
