[Novalug] F12 - several issues

Paul W. Frields stickster@gmail.com
Fri Feb 12 10:09:35 EST 2010


On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 03:56:02PM -0800, Walt Smith wrote:
> 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  ??

Generally, menu entries get made automatically for GUI applications,
but not CLI commands.

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

Understandable!

> see inline ... 

You might want to look at your Yahoo Mail settings to see if there's a
way to do proper quoting in replies.  It's really hard to distinguish
your replies from other parts of the thread otherwise.

> 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.

Yes -- this kind of peer support is one of the hallmarks of free
software, after all!

> 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 ( wit the f10 designator) but now seems to be pretty out of date,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"..

There's no good reason to use yumdownloader to download a binary RPM
if all you want to do is to install it.  Just use yum itself -- it
takes care of downloading and installing everything you need from the
repositories you've configured.  If you want stuff from repositories
that are outside Fedora, you usually just need to go to the website of
that repository, and read their instructions for installing full yum
support.  Often this just means clicking on their link for a
"*-release" RPM, and bingo-bango, it's all done for your automatically
through PackageKit.

Some people wonder why there's not just a checkbox somewhere for you
to click to enable legally questionable stuff, such as
patent-encumbered codecs.  That's because under US law, that could
amount to contributory infringement.  It would be a bad idea for the
Fedora Project to expose our sponsors and participants such as Red Hat
to legal risk in that way.  That would distract from the enormous
contributions they make to free software.

[...snip...]
> > 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)

You could also look at the output of 'dmesg' to see if there's a
particular error that's happened to precipitate or signal the failure.

> > 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".)
[...snip...]

As noted above, you could just do 'yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad'
and the installation would just happen.  For that matter, it's
probably even easier just to use the GUI Add/Remove Software tool and
search for 'gstreamer' or 'gstreamer-plugins-bad' to point and click
your way through the process.  No need for a CLI really, and certainly
no need to manually download and then painstakingly install things by
hand.


-- 
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



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