[Novalug] F12 - several issues

Walt Smith waltechmail@yahoo.com
Thu Feb 11 18:56:02 EST 2010


Paul - and Beartooth,

Thanks for all the good info !!
yes, Beartooth mentioned alacarte, and I installed it.
It's what I want.  I could never guess the name.
His menu path link was "Very Close".  And wasn't on my box.
I always have one or two or so programs I want to start from a 
menu.  In F10, one gui program was Evince (pdf viewer) ,
and it didn't install a menu item.  I couldn't believe the menu
config pgm was missing !!

hmmmm, after writing the rest of this reply, I wonder if the 
Add/Remove Paul mentions will auto-put a line item in the menu's
on it's own, even for some simple cli  ??

I also prefer not to go in a poke thru the darned xml files,
for several reasons.

see inline ... 

> 2.
> multi-media is as much crap shoot.  More work to do...
> labor intensive.

Have you come by the #fedora IRC channel to ask for help?  There are
instructions for getting connected here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/IRC

-
I can't imagine a bunch of people sitting around waiting
for my "call" !! <grin>.  But perhaps I should try it sometime.

aside:
Since a user mentioned yumdownloader awhile back, I tried it
a few times and now know what it can do.  In particular, it
can D/L the rpms to a dir, which is what I want -- besides
taking the task of FINDING all the packages.  And listing the urls.
  
The one drawback is on dialup, it like to D/L about 10 MB's of
updates, usually before it starts the real work.

I finished in several more sessions today: yumdownloader found
and D/L about 30 files I needed.  I had to interpret some of the
higher file packages to see what else was needed.  For example,
I thought I was D/L gstreamer for mplayer, but it really did it 
for Totem.   totem isn't mentioned in the 

http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f12.html

web page I've often used.  This web page was fairly complete
( wit the f10 designator) but now seems to be pretty out of date,
but still useful.

the gstreamer parts required quite a few files, and some were
audio, some video and "what-not"..


Just FYI, a "monitor" device is a tap on an output that you can use as
an input.  So for instance, if I have an output device that's a "USB
Headset", then the "Monitor of USB Headset" allows me to use what is
coming to the USB headset headphones as an input (i.e. I can record
that or pass it through other things).  Very useful in some
situations.

*THANKS

> 5.
>  I've had networking stop once or twice on dialup after it had
> been working for a time.
> The one noticeable time I looked at it, yesterday, I tried a ping
> and this is the result. The connection was "up", "modem lights"
> showed it connected but would not blink, ifconfig showed good ppp
> but no packets went out:
> ------
> [waltech@waltech3 ~]$ ping 209.163.112.33
> PING 209.163.112.33 (209.163.112.33) 56(84) bytes of data.
> ping: sendmsg: No buffer space available
> ping: sendmsg: No buffer space available
> ping: sendmsg: No buffer space available
> ----
>
> I've never seen this message before.
> Any ideas ??

Yikes, could this be related to your card itself?  Have you tried a
different modem to see if there's any difference?  What kind of modem
are you using?  ('lspci' or 'lsusb', depending on how the hardware is
connected, should tell you.)


I'll get that info should it occur again.
It's a external 33k hardware  RS-232 modem.
(I have a 56k I might plop on)

> This may be related to a yumdownloader failure earlier.
> yumdownloader stopped working, and I got a list of apparent
> python messages ( fail messages on console with some names
> ending in .py )

It might be -- yum wouldn't be the cause, but you would have seen an
effect if your connection stopped working in the middle of a yum run.
Those Python messages actually can be read and used to determine the
problem that occurred.


The problem was last night.
For some reason. when I started yumdownloader today,
I seemed to have no problems at all. I think it ran smoother once
it got past the 10 meg initial db updates.

aside:
just for my own system info, I think I'd like to have/do:
yumdownloader --urls gstreamer-plugins-bad > extra_file.txt
yumdownloader --resolve gstreamer-plugins-bad >> extra-file.txt

so I can have all the info when I want to find something.
( and demonstrates for someone who might be reading this
how to use it. Using --urls AND --resolve together won't
give you the "expected".)


aside:
8.
I note that in FF3.5, the web site timeout is much faster
than 3.0.x.  I assume this is FF, and not some tcp thing in
the kernel.  I really like the faster timeout ( where it displays
a timeout message box) IFF I was using a "high speed" connection.
But if I have 2-3 web pages loading in tabs ( or a ftp D/L) w/ dialup
at the same time, the timeouts are annoying since I have to either close
a window or re-inititate the web page load. 

I"m merely recording the behavior here, in case someone else
finds it also.

> 6.
>  I BELIEVE that packagekitd is automatically started
> when I don't want it to.   At a command line, if I type:
> #vim filename
>
> and vim isn't installed, I get the start of some "downloading"
> message.  I don't have the exact message as I don't want to
> start the damn thing again.. it hogs my dialup connection.
> I don't see where to disable this from happening.
> There is no packagekitd in "services" ( no name even close).
>
> can someone verify this ? or suggest where I can control it ?

The command not found plugin is a feature, and you can turn it off in
/etc/PackageKit/CommandNotFound.conf.  There is a line
SoftwareSourceSearch=true that you can change to =false I believe.


YES -- THANKS !!  
I found it, fixed it !!!  thx !


-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
          Where open source multiplies: http://opensource.com


THANKS,   it's a big help !!!

Walt...................




      



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