BLUG

[BLUG] available and wanted equipment

2010-01-02T13:36:00.000-08:00

I have a Digital VT510-C2 terminal with keyboard that I'm looking to
place in a good home. Also available is a non-functional HP desktop if
anyone wants it for parts.

If anyone has a spare or old wireless PCMIA card lying around, I would
be happy to pick it up from you. I can't seem to get the built-in
wireless working on my laptop so I'm looking for a Linux-friendly card
that I could get running a couple of minutes.

Thanks,
Chris

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] My KDExperience

2010-01-01T23:07:00.000-08:00

2009/12/28 Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu>:
> On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 09:07:07PM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
[snip]
>> Right now the desktop still feels a bit strange because I'm getting used
>> to things like having to press Ctrl+shift+n for a new terminal tab
>> instead of Ctrl+Shift+t. But those are minor things that will pass.
>> We've definately come a long ways since the days of the FVWM window
>> manager, which could do pretty much anything you wanted, but you had to
>> modify a text file to do it and then reload FVWM.
>
> You can easily tweak the keymap in konsole. It is handy to (for
> instance) disable F1 for help if you find you accidentally press it when
> reaching for ESC.
>
> In fact, you can tweak the keys in pretty much any KDE application. I
> recently wanted to disable Alt-Left-Arrow in Firefox and, to my dismay,
> I found I couldn't change any of the key-mappings. I'm used to KDE
> allowing me to get things to work the way I want.

This is only because Firefox is a Windows application masquerading as
a gtk application in linux. The gnome hid says that users should be
able to change keyboard shortcuts for menu items by hovering the mouse
over the item (or at least, highlighting the item) and pressing the
new shortcut (backspace once clears). Try it in any hid-compliant gtk
program.

Disabling Alt-← in a real gtk browser (like galeon or epiphany) is as
easy as going into the "Go" or "View" or whatever menu, highlighting
"Back", and hitting backspace over it.

--
Jonathan

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] New Years Countdown timer

2010-01-01T22:08:00.001-08:00

I modified this some to work with zsh and so that it doesn't crash if
you start it after the new year ;)

Also, I tried running it shortly before midnight last night, only to
find that my clock was a couple decaseconds (not deciseconds!) off. I
poked at ntpdate frantically, but my wife and parents were trying to
hand me a glass of champagne already, so I decided there were more
important things to spend the last few seconds of 2009 on ;)

In the spirit of keeping modifications to open source things out
there, I've included my [only slightly] modified version below. Maybe
there should be a clause for "Sorry, you missed it already" instead of
saying "Happy New Year!" when run at this point..

while V=$((`date +%s -d"2010-01-01"`-`date +%s`)); do \
if [[ $V -le 0 ]]; then \
toilet -f smmono12 --gay 'Happy New Year!'; \
break; \
else \
clear; \
toilet -f bigmono12 --gay $V; \
sleep 1; \
fi; \
done;

P.S. one of my later BASIC programs over a decade ago (a few years
before I really discovered linux) was a new year countdown timer. I
think I was preparing it for y2k, but I'm not sure anymore. It was
much longer and more complicated than this script, since I didn't know
about / have utilities like date and toilet, much less regexes (which
I did all by hand, ugh).

--
Jonathan

2009/12/30 Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu>:
> I ran the script and found (1) I didn't have figlet installed, and (2) it
> suggested I install either figlet or toilet. I installed them both, but
> I think I like toilet's default letters better.
>
> In fact, here's my extended edition of the command (wrapped to be easy
> to read, but with line-continuation so you can copy/paste):
>
> while V=$((`date +%s -d"2010-01-01"`-`date +%s`)); do \
> if [ $V == 0 ]; then \
> toilet -f smmono12 --gay 'Happy New Year!'; \
> break; \
> else \
> clear; \
> toilet -f bigmono12 --gay $V; \
> sleep 1; \
> fi; \
> done
>
> I think the --gay toilet is just thing the any New Year's bash.
>
> Cheers,
> Steven Black
>
> On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 06:43:48PM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
>>
>>
>> This is what I just posted to the climagic account on twitter and
>> identi.ca:
>>
>> while V=$((`date +%s -d"2010-01-01"`-`date +%s`));do if [ $V == 0 ];then figlet 'Happy New Year!';break;else figlet $V;sleep 1;clear;fi;done
>>
>> Of course I was limited to 140 characters. Anyways, I thought some
>> people here might appreciate this little snippet.
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] BLUG Digest, Vol 22, Issue 9

2009-12-31T08:38:00.000-08:00

I am an xterm guy. I use something like this at startup.

My nine window startup script below! Give it a try.
---------------
#! /bin/bash
cd $HOME
xterm -sl 10000 +sb -fg black -bg white -title HOME -geometry +0+0 &
xterm -sl 10000 +sb -fg black -bg white -title HOME -geometry +0+380 &
xterm -sl 10000 +sb -fg black -bg white -title HOME -geometry +0+740 &
xterm -sl 10000 +sb -fg black -bg white -title HOME -geometry +510+0 &
xterm -sl 10000 +sb -fg black -bg white -title HOME -geometry +510+380 &
xterm -sl 10000 +sb -fg black -bg white -title HOME -geometry +510+740 &
xterm -sl 10000 +sb -fg black -bg white -title HOME -geometry +1020+0 &
xterm -sl 10000 +sb -fg black -bg white -title HOME -geometry +1020+380 &
xterm -sl 10000 +sb -fg black -bg white -title HOME -geometry +1020+740 &
exit

On Dec 30, 2009, at 12:00 PM, blug-request@cs.indiana.edu wrote:

> Send BLUG mailing list submissions to
> blug@mailman.cs.indiana.edu
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> blug-request@mailman.cs.indiana.edu
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> blug-owner@mailman.cs.indiana.edu
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of BLUG digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. What size terminal do you use? (Mark Krenz)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:52:52 +0000
> From: Mark Krenz <mark@slugbug.org>
> Subject: [BLUG] What size terminal do you use?
> To: blug@cs.indiana.edu
> Message-ID: <20091230145252.GW14381@arvo.suso.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>
> Quick poll. If you use some specific size for your terminal (xterm,
> aterm, gnome-terminal, konsole, etc.), what size do you use and why?
> Also, curious about what terminal you use specifically these days.
>
> Myself, I usually use a terminal that is 160x60, which is way
> oversized and sometimes presents problems on smaller screens like a
> laptop screen or when I want to use a bigger font. But I like the
> space and I often have lists of whatever data on my screen that I need
> to compare. I've thought about making 160x50 my standard though
> recently. I use konsole now, and gnome-terminal before that. Prior to
> that I used aterm for a long time because of its speed.
>
> --
> Mark Krenz
> Bloomington Linux Users Group
> http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>
>
> End of BLUG Digest, Vol 22, Issue 9
> ***********************************

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] What size terminal do you use?

2009-12-30T20:02:00.001-08:00

I use ROXTerm at 80x24, just because that size doesn't seem too big or
too small. I use a smallish font so it doesn't take up too much space
on my netbook screen--less than ⅔ of both the horizontal and vertical
space. I also use a gtk theme with very short tabs to save on screen
real estate.

ROXTerm is based on gnome-terminal (so's also a familiar-feeling
tabbed gtk2 terminal), but seems to be faster and has much better
options for configuration (and also a couple bugs). It's also
designed to go with other ROX software, such as ROX filer and ROX's
session manager, both of which I use.

--
Jonathan

2009/12/30 Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu>:
> On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 02:52:52PM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
>> Quick poll. If you use some specific size for your terminal (xterm,
>> aterm, gnome-terminal, konsole, etc.), what size do you use and why?
>> Also, curious about what terminal you use specifically these days.
>
> I currently use Konsole.
>
> I have the ncurses-term package installed, so my TERM is set to
> "konsole". I like well defined terminal characteristics, so I don't
> like terminals to use 'xterm' unless they're 100% xterm compatible.
> Neither gnome-terminal nor konsole is 100% compatible. (To be 100%
> compatible you need (1) Tektronix mode, and (2) to fail under the same
> circumstances as xterm.) Additionally, using the stock 'xterm' requires
> that apps either ignore the terminfo characteristics or are limited to
> 16 colors. A proper terminfo would list whether you support extended
> colors like xterm-256 or xterm-88.
>
> I enjoy roguelike games, and poorly defined terminals are the bane of
> nice roguelike games.
>
> In the office, I use terminals that are 24/25 rows, and either 80
> columns or a little more to fill. (10 pt. font, usually two windows at
> the bottom of the screen, with a browser and IRC/IM/etc client filling
> the upper half of that monitor)
>
> At home, where the light is more variable and the distance to the laptop
> tends to also be more variable than my seating at work, I have settings
> which are designed to be gentle on my eyes: Monospace font at 14 pt,
> between 80 and about 94 columns (I rarely maximize the width), and it is
> usually maximized vertically giving me 37 rows.
>
> I also leverage custom color sets, due to my inability to easily read
> dark blue on black (which always seems painfully popular in color
> apps). I use custom dark-background colors, and a custom inverted
> color set. The inverted color set is easier on my eyes in low-power
> settings on my laptop, (I can read it with the display set to dimmest
> with plenty of ambient light), and is specifically designed so that I
> can continue using apps which become illegible if you simply swap the
> default foreground/background colors.
>
> Back in my youth, I'd use SVGATextMode to get Linux consoles in hi-res
> text modes. These days I figure if I'm not kind on my eyes early,
> they'll only give me more trouble later.
>
> While working, I use tabs and more than one terminal emulator, but when
> I'm off-work I'm 100% GNU Screen with a single terminal emulator.
>
> Cheers,
> Steven Black
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] New Years Countdown timer

2009-12-30T12:35:00.001-08:00

I ran the script and found (1) I didn't have figlet installed, and (2) it
suggested I install either figlet or toilet. I installed them both, but
I think I like toilet's default letters better.

In fact, here's my extended edition of the command (wrapped to be easy
to read, but with line-continuation so you can copy/paste):

while V=$((`date +%s -d"2010-01-01"`-`date +%s`)); do \
if [ $V == 0 ]; then \
toilet -f smmono12 --gay 'Happy New Year!'; \
break; \
else \
clear; \
toilet -f bigmono12 --gay $V; \
sleep 1; \
fi; \
done

I think the --gay toilet is just thing the any New Year's bash.

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 06:43:48PM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
>
>
> This is what I just posted to the climagic account on twitter and
> identi.ca:
>
> while V=$((`date +%s -d"2010-01-01"`-`date +%s`));do if [ $V == 0 ];then figlet 'Happy New Year!';break;else figlet $V;sleep 1;clear;fi;done
>
> Of course I was limited to 140 characters. Anyways, I thought some
> people here might appreciate this little snippet.

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] What size terminal do you use?

2009-12-30T11:57:00.001-08:00

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 02:52:52PM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
> Quick poll. If you use some specific size for your terminal (xterm,
> aterm, gnome-terminal, konsole, etc.), what size do you use and why?
> Also, curious about what terminal you use specifically these days.

I currently use Konsole.

I have the ncurses-term package installed, so my TERM is set to
"konsole". I like well defined terminal characteristics, so I don't
like terminals to use 'xterm' unless they're 100% xterm compatible.
Neither gnome-terminal nor konsole is 100% compatible. (To be 100%
compatible you need (1) Tektronix mode, and (2) to fail under the same
circumstances as xterm.) Additionally, using the stock 'xterm' requires
that apps either ignore the terminfo characteristics or are limited to
16 colors. A proper terminfo would list whether you support extended
colors like xterm-256 or xterm-88.

I enjoy roguelike games, and poorly defined terminals are the bane of
nice roguelike games.

In the office, I use terminals that are 24/25 rows, and either 80
columns or a little more to fill. (10 pt. font, usually two windows at
the bottom of the screen, with a browser and IRC/IM/etc client filling
the upper half of that monitor)

At home, where the light is more variable and the distance to the laptop
tends to also be more variable than my seating at work, I have settings
which are designed to be gentle on my eyes: Monospace font at 14 pt,
between 80 and about 94 columns (I rarely maximize the width), and it is
usually maximized vertically giving me 37 rows.

I also leverage custom color sets, due to my inability to easily read
dark blue on black (which always seems painfully popular in color
apps). I use custom dark-background colors, and a custom inverted
color set. The inverted color set is easier on my eyes in low-power
settings on my laptop, (I can read it with the display set to dimmest
with plenty of ambient light), and is specifically designed so that I
can continue using apps which become illegible if you simply swap the
default foreground/background colors.

Back in my youth, I'd use SVGATextMode to get Linux consoles in hi-res
text modes. These days I figure if I'm not kind on my eyes early,
they'll only give me more trouble later.

While working, I use tabs and more than one terminal emulator, but when
I'm off-work I'm 100% GNU Screen with a single terminal emulator.

Cheers,
Steven Black

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] What size terminal do you use?

2009-12-30T11:14:00.000-08:00

On Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:52:52 -0500, Mark Krenz <mark@slugbug.org> wrote:

> Quick poll. If you use some specific size for your terminal (xterm,
> aterm, gnome-terminal, konsole, etc.), what size do you use and why?
> Also, curious about what terminal you use specifically these days.

I tend to use the most native terminal for the Environment in which I am
working. If that is something like XFCE, then I use the XFCE Terminal, if
KDE, then I use Konsole, if something like MaXX or Mwm, then I use the
xterm(1). The only one on which I really both to adjust the fonts is the
xterm, where they are almost always a little too small. I usually use
something around a 10 point font. I like to keep my terminal width
constant to about 80 columns, but I will scale the height up and down
depending on the task at hand. As I almost never edit directly in the
terminal, I don't care so much about that.

The reason I don't usually adjust the fonts explicitly is because I set
default fonts in my environment that suits. Usually this is something like
the Luxi family of fonts at 10 points. I don't know what DPI my monitor is
at though, but I am running 1680x1050.

Aaron W. Hsu

--
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

[BLUG] New Years Countdown timer

2009-12-30T10:43:00.000-08:00

This is what I just posted to the climagic account on twitter and
identi.ca:

while V=$((`date +%s -d"2010-01-01"`-`date +%s`));do if [ $V == 0 ];then figlet 'Happy New Year!';break;else figlet $V;sleep 1;clear;fi;done

Of course I was limited to 140 characters. Anyways, I thought some
people here might appreciate this little snippet.

--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] test

2009-12-30T09:43:00.001-08:00

Ahh cool. Party on! Happy New Year!

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 05:40:28PM GMT, Shei, Shing-Shong [shei@cs.indiana.edu] said the following:
> Because we were doing some system maintenance and the mail server's
> sendmail was turned off for a while. :-) Happy New Year!
>
> > Sorry, just testing the list, it was slow earlier (1 hour delay) and I
> > was wondering why.
> >
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

Re: [BLUG] test

2009-12-30T09:40:00.001-08:00

Because we were doing some system maintenance and the mail server's
sendmail was turned off for a while. :-) Happy New Year!

> Sorry, just testing the list, it was slow earlier (1 hour delay) and I
> was wondering why.
>
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

[BLUG] test

2009-12-30T09:37:00.000-08:00

Sorry, just testing the list, it was slow earlier (1 hour delay) and I
was wondering why.

Re: [BLUG] What size terminal do you use?

2009-12-30T09:19:00.000-08:00

> What size terminal do you use?
>
I use Konsole at 80x51 with Dejavu Sans Mono 10pt, with antialiasing on. I use
vim for most editing, and set it to wrap at 78 characters. Occasionally I
will make it wider if I am doing something which has ugly wrapping or
truncating, like looking at top with full command listings, or looking at
mysql output.
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

[BLUG] What size terminal do you use?

2009-12-30T06:52:00.000-08:00

Quick poll. If you use some specific size for your terminal (xterm,
aterm, gnome-terminal, konsole, etc.), what size do you use and why?
Also, curious about what terminal you use specifically these days.

Myself, I usually use a terminal that is 160x60, which is way
oversized and sometimes presents problems on smaller screens like a
laptop screen or when I want to use a bigger font. But I like the
space and I often have lists of whatever data on my screen that I need
to compare. I've thought about making 160x50 my standard though
recently. I use konsole now, and gnome-terminal before that. Prior to
that I used aterm for a long time because of its speed.

Re: [BLUG] My KDExperience

2009-12-28T14:32:00.001-08:00

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 09:07:07PM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
> - Places that can use some improvement or that I don't like. -
>
> 1. Some settings not organized well. Even though KDE has lots of
> configurability, its been a bit difficult to find some settings that
> seem like they should be easy to find. The interface for changing
> settings is inconsistent and I'm still not sure in what places I need to
> single click and what places I need to double click.

I'm not sure if this is related to the single/double click setting. I've
seen this before, and I suspect it is a matter of some applications not
acknowledging the single/double click setting.

> 2. Taskbar applications are shown for all desktops. In other words,
> instead of the application taskbar showing only the items for the
> current desktop, it shows it for all desktops. Maybe someone will be
> able to help me with this as I haven't found a solution for this yet.
> It seems like this would be an easy thing to set, but apparently its
> not. This probably falls under my #1 gripe as well.

This is set in the "Task Manager Settings." I find the easiest way to
get to this menu is to right-click in the task manager area before I've
opened any windows.

> 3. Lock desktop widget is too big. This is the OCD part of me, but the
> widget for locking the screen is made for a lock icon and a logout icon.
> I rarely logout of my desktop when I leave for the day, but there is a
> way to disable the displaying of the logout icon. But when you do that,
> the widget still takes up the same amount of space.

That seems like a bug in the widget. Note that this isn't trouble
resizing the widget, it is that the footprint remains the same size even
if you disable one of the icons.

> 4. Konsole doesn't have a setting in the GUI for terminal geometry and
> the --geometry option doesn't seem to work as advertised. This really
> annoys me because its 2009 and some of the most basic options for X
> windows are being ignored by people who should know better.

Hmm. Some simple testing indicates that options are not quite parsed as
I would expect. I think we may be seeing some sort of issue with single
launch vs. multiple launch. --profile isn't working as expected from
within an existing konsole.

#5 was removed? It wasn't listed.

> 6. Kmadness. Why does every application for KDE have to have to start
> with a K. I guess its kinda like how many x applications start with an x
> for x windows. While it might make it nice for discovering new commands
> by using tab completition, it gets mundane after a while. I feel like
> my desktop is a big pun.

I hear you. The GNOME folks have their 'G' in their names, the KDE folks
usually have a 'K' in their names. It appears right now the G in the
names of GNOME apps may not be quite as popular as the K in the KDE
names.

In my mind, this sort of naming scheme does nothing but provide a larger
name space for applications. It can be useful for that alone, but it is
not something actually useful for the end-user.

> 7. Fonts aren't as good. I thought this was more X specific, but I
> guess not. Some of the fonts that KDE uses by default are not as smooth
> or as readable as the ones I was using in Gnome. I realize that the
> fonts can be changed, but changing fonts is generally something I leave
> alone because you're never sure whether the font you choose is going to
> have all the charcters or cause other issues like overflowing the
> boundary area for the text.

Sounds like you need to tweak your font anti-aliasing.
In "System Settings" -> "Appearance" -> "Fonts" -> "Use anti-aliasing".

I use Kubuntu, and mine is set to "System settings". I'm not exactly
sure where these "system settings" are defined, though. (As far as I
know it is pulling system settings set when I configured things in
KDE3.)

I've never had issues with applications breaking when I changed the
system fonts. (I've changed it before.) KDE makes it easy to adjust all
the fonts together, which is handy.

> 8. Some weird issues with Konsole. Sometimes when I select text in
> Konsole, it doesn't render the whole window and it seems as if the
> window closed, but it just needs to be redrawn by moving it or switching
> desktops. This might be related to compositing.

I don't have that issue... but then I don't use compositing.

> Right now the desktop still feels a bit strange because I'm getting used
> to things like having to press Ctrl+shift+n for a new terminal tab
> instead of Ctrl+Shift+t. But those are minor things that will pass.
> We've definately come a long ways since the days of the FVWM window
> manager, which could do pretty much anything you wanted, but you had to
> modify a text file to do it and then reload FVWM.

You can easily tweak the keymap in konsole. It is handy to (for
instance) disable F1 for help if you find you accidentally press it when
reaching for ESC.

In fact, you can tweak the keys in pretty much any KDE application. I
recently wanted to disable Alt-Left-Arrow in Firefox and, to my dismay,
I found I couldn't change any of the key-mappings. I'm used to KDE
allowing me to get things to work the way I want.

Cheers,
Steven Black

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

[BLUG] My KDExperience

2009-12-28T13:07:00.001-08:00

Recently, I decided to try using KDE after using Gnome for several
years and FVWM prior to that. I have used KDE in the past, even since
version 1.0, but I never really spent too much time in it before moving
back.

Now I've had a week or two to get used to it I can appreciate more of
what is there in the latest versions. Keep in mind that this overview
mostly covers things with the default setups, I know its possible to
correct or enhance things with KDE or Gnome or Xfce or whatever your
obscure desktop manager is, but there is a lot to be said for having
things available and ready to go from the start.

- Here are some good things I've found about using KDE -

1. Customization - This is probably the number one gripe I have with Gnome.
Part of what makes the open source world of computing great is that you
can customize things exactly the way you want. Gnome has gotten away
from this in recent years and I've heard that KDE has been pushing this
more. Its definately true, with the default KDE setup, you can
customize exactly how windows work. For instance, if I want to have a
specific class of windows not take priority for focus of the mouse
pointer, I can do that. One place we're I've had to use this is when
watching a movie or something on my desktop, I'll have the movie playing
on one monitor and with the default settings, if I switch desktops, the
movie will sometimes grab mouse focus and I don't like that,
fortunately, KDE provides the facilities to easily change that.

There are many other places where this is the case too, for instance
in the Konsole terminal emulator, you can easily override the keyboard
layout just within Konsole. So if you want to make F1 do something else
inside Konsole than Kate (text editor) does, you can do that easily.

2. Desktop widgets. I'm a gkrellm man. I usually put my gkrellm
monitoring display over on the side of the desk and leave it alone. But
with KDE widgets, I haven't even started gkrellm yet. I guess I just
found that having one CPU graph is good enough and the LCD weather
display is nice. Plus, having RSS feeds that don't fall into the window
class category makes sense to me.

3. Quickly access an application with Alt+F2 (using Krunner). At first I
thought that the KDE application menu was a bit clunky to use, but then
I realized that the real power comes with using Alt+F2 and then typing
in part of the name of the application you want. Its much better than
Gnome's program execution window as it quickly displays icons and
descriptions of programs you might want. I haven't had to do it yet,
but Krunner can be configured to be command oriented or task oriented.

4. This is not that important really but desktop backgrounds can be set
differently on different screens of a multi head display. Thus freeing
you from having to stretch a 1024x768 res picture in weird ways or
making your own. I can't believe that Gnome hasn't tacked this one yet.
Seems like it would be easy to do.

5. Although I don't use it much, the file manager in KDE is nice and
fast. Gnome's isn't too bad, but the KDE one offers more options and
seems more powerful, so I will probably end up using it more.

6. Last but not least. KDE is fast and snappy. I didn't really expect it
so be slow, but it definately doesn't have slowness problems. Gnome
isn't really slow either, but its nice to know that both desktops are
strong in this area, which no doubt is a major draw to Linux for people
seeking an alternate desktop environment.

- Places that can use some improvement or that I don't like. -

1. Some settings not organized well. Even though KDE has lots of
configurability, its been a bit difficult to find some settings that
seem like they should be easy to find. The interface for changing
settings is inconsistent and I'm still not sure in what places I need to
single click and what places I need to double click.

2. Taskbar applications are shown for all desktops. In other words,
instead of the application taskbar showing only the items for the
current desktop, it shows it for all desktops. Maybe someone will be
able to help me with this as I haven't found a solution for this yet.
It seems like this would be an easy thing to set, but apparently its
not. This probably falls under my #1 gripe as well.

3. Lock desktop widget is too big. This is the OCD part of me, but the
widget for locking the screen is made for a lock icon and a logout icon.
I rarely logout of my desktop when I leave for the day, but there is a
way to disable the displaying of the logout icon. But when you do that,
the widget still takes up the same amount of space.

4. Konsole doesn't have a setting in the GUI for terminal geometry and
the --geometry option doesn't seem to work as advertised. This really
annoys me because its 2009 and some of the most basic options for X
windows are being ignored by people who should know better.

6. Kmadness. Why does every application for KDE have to have to start
with a K. I guess its kinda like how many x applications start with an x
for x windows. While it might make it nice for discovering new commands
by using tab completition, it gets mundane after a while. I feel like
my desktop is a big pun.

7. Fonts aren't as good. I thought this was more X specific, but I
guess not. Some of the fonts that KDE uses by default are not as smooth
or as readable as the ones I was using in Gnome. I realize that the
fonts can be changed, but changing fonts is generally something I leave
alone because you're never sure whether the font you choose is going to
have all the charcters or cause other issues like overflowing the
boundary area for the text.

8. Some weird issues with Konsole. Sometimes when I select text in
Konsole, it doesn't render the whole window and it seems as if the
window closed, but it just needs to be redrawn by moving it or switching
desktops. This might be related to compositing.

Right now the desktop still feels a bit strange because I'm getting used
to things like having to press Ctrl+shift+n for a new terminal tab
instead of Ctrl+Shift+t. But those are minor things that will pass.
We've definately come a long ways since the days of the FVWM window
manager, which could do pretty much anything you wanted, but you had to
modify a text file to do it and then reload FVWM.

Re: [BLUG] Fwd: possible causes of segfaults

2009-12-22T07:33:00.000-08:00

Your ld's got segment fault inside the shared library libc-2.9.so which,
in generally, is a relatively bug-free piece of software as it's so
important that essentially every single piece of program will call it.
It should have been loaded and resides in the memory and just that 7
invocation of ld's (since the PIDs are different) segfault'ed at
different points in libc makes me wonder if somehow the memory is at
fault. So it might not be a bad idea to run a memory test program (such
as memtest86+) to check your memory. Have a good holiday! --Shing-Shong

> Hiya,
>
> I just installed a new file / computation server at my work, and a few
> days into its tenure, I've started noticing some segfaults.
>
> For instance, I was running a bunch of image processing jobs, and
> ImageMagick's "convert" program segfaulted. I ran it again on the
> same data, and it did fine. So I'm wondering if I have bad hardware,
> or bad libraries, or what?
>
> Possible causes of segmentation faults that I know of:
> Hardware --- could be very random and difficult to find, might need to
> totally shut down the server and run a memory tester for days in order
> to find.
>
> Filesystem corruption --- should be reproducible, right? if "convert"
> segfaults once, it should do it again...
>
> Libraries / os problems --- should be reproducible too, right?
>
>
>
> from dmesg:
> [17217.872070] ld[16027]: segfault at 0 ip 00002ae3b445411b sp
> 00007fffc39a74e8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2ae3b43d0000+168000]
> [17354.753195] ld[20115]: segfault at 0 ip 00002b832843d11b sp
> 00007fff729f2fa8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2b83283b9000+168000]
> [19463.265457] ld[3673]: segfault at 0 ip 00002ad2f7a3a11b sp
> 00007fffd11023a8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2ad2f79b6000+168000]
> [19474.653491] ld[3680]: segfault at 0 ip 00002b7f10f0e11b sp
> 00007fffbac8a978 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2b7f10e8a000+168000]
> [19507.935271] ld[3687]: segfault at 0 ip 00002af5c9eb511b sp
> 00007fff12fe00d8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2af5c9e31000+168000]
> [19528.740436] ld[3701]: segfault at 0 ip 00002b265616a11b sp
> 00007fff2ceb8d98 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2b26560e6000+168000]
> [19606.865585] ld[3754]: segfault at 0 ip 00002ae3a079811b sp
> 00007fff6bc4d3c8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2ae3a0714000+168000]
> [263529.064795] convert[24941]: segfault at 7fffd973b6b8 ip
> 00007fffdb1e2ed9 sp 00007fffd973b660 error 7 in
> libMagickCore.so.1.0.0[7fffdb0fe000+1b5000]
> [268495.776398] convert[28595]: segfault at 7fffc7e2b608 ip
> 00007fffc9e13ed9 sp 00007fffc7e2b5b0 error 7 in
> libMagickCore.so.1.0.0[7fffc9d2f000+1b5000]
>
>
>
> Any advice?
> Thanks,
> -Thomas
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Fwd: possible causes of segfaults

2009-12-22T06:50:00.001-08:00

Hiya,

Well, I'm using Ubuntu, and generally upgrades go fine without
rebooting... It's a nice server machine with ECC memory. So yeah, it
should really be at least telling me if I'm getting memory corruption,
if not fixing it outright.

Hmm, once, I had a computer that, on one version of Linux, was fine,
and on the next version (2.6.15->2.6.16 or something) would flip one
bit every 600MB of i/o. It slowly corrupted the entire filesystem and
... yuck. So I guess right now I'm suspecting Linux, or something
subtle in the hardware.

Thanks for your advice! It's good to narrow it down a bit. I'll
probably come in sometime over break (my boss will probably work the
whole week, but nobody else is here, and he can deal) and run that
memory test, as you say.

Bleh,
-Thomas

On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 4:33 PM, Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> wrote:
> Did you upgrade the system without rebooting it? (That should be
> reproducible, though.) Are you using a version of ImageMagick compiled
> for a different distribution of Linux? (I know a lot of RPM-based
> systems do not bundle a lot of programs.)
>
> If you downloaded an RPM that wasn't compiled specifically for your
> distribution/version, I would expect that to be the cause of the
> problem. If that's the cause of the problem, building it from source
> should clear it up.
>
> If you're using the version of ImageMagick that comes with your
> distribution and you've not recently performed an upgrade, memory
> corruption seems the most likely candidate. Does that machine have
> unparitied memory? Any type of memory other than unparitied would likely
> show an error instead of just producing bogus data. (It is why I hate
> unparitied memory.)
>
> It could also be a CPU fault.
>
> Problems with hard drives tend to show up as errors with the specific
> media. (It'll list the device producing the error.) Hardware problems
> regarding media do not normally produce segfaults, unless the
> application fails to handle the error case.
>
> My recommendation: Pick an upcoming weekend and tell them the services
> of this machine will be unavailable. Then start the memory test at
> 5:15pm (adjusted for the end of your workday) and run a memory checker
> all weekend. Then come in 15 minutes early on Monday to check for errors
> and reboot the system.
>
> Cheers,
> Steven Black
>
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 03:58:40PM -0500, Thomas Smith wrote:
>> Hiya,
>>
>> I just installed a new file / computation server at my work, and a few
>> days into its tenure, I've started noticing some segfaults.
>>
>> For instance, I was running a bunch of image processing jobs, and
>> ImageMagick's "convert" program segfaulted. I ran it again on the
>> same data, and it did fine. So I'm wondering if I have bad hardware,
>> or bad libraries, or what?
>>
>> Possible causes of segmentation faults that I know of:
>> Hardware --- could be very random and difficult to find, might need to
>> totally shut down the server and run a memory tester for days in order
>> to find.
>>
>> Filesystem corruption --- should be reproducible, right? if "convert"
>> segfaults once, it should do it again...
>>
>> Libraries / os problems --- should be reproducible too, right?
>>
>>
>>
>> from dmesg:
>> [17217.872070] ld[16027]: segfault at 0 ip 00002ae3b445411b sp
>> 00007fffc39a74e8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2ae3b43d0000+168000]
>> [17354.753195] ld[20115]: segfault at 0 ip 00002b832843d11b sp
>> 00007fff729f2fa8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2b83283b9000+168000]
>> [19463.265457] ld[3673]: segfault at 0 ip 00002ad2f7a3a11b sp
>> 00007fffd11023a8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2ad2f79b6000+168000]
>> [19474.653491] ld[3680]: segfault at 0 ip 00002b7f10f0e11b sp
>> 00007fffbac8a978 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2b7f10e8a000+168000]
>> [19507.935271] ld[3687]: segfault at 0 ip 00002af5c9eb511b sp
>> 00007fff12fe00d8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2af5c9e31000+168000]
>> [19528.740436] ld[3701]: segfault at 0 ip 00002b265616a11b sp
>> 00007fff2ceb8d98 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2b26560e6000+168000]
>> [19606.865585] ld[3754]: segfault at 0 ip 00002ae3a079811b sp
>> 00007fff6bc4d3c8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2ae3a0714000+168000]
>> [263529.064795] convert[24941]: segfault at 7fffd973b6b8 ip
>> 00007fffdb1e2ed9 sp 00007fffd973b660 error 7 in
>> libMagickCore.so.1.0.0[7fffdb0fe000+1b5000]
>> [268495.776398] convert[28595]: segfault at 7fffc7e2b608 ip
>> 00007fffc9e13ed9 sp 00007fffc7e2b5b0 error 7 in
>> libMagickCore.so.1.0.0[7fffc9d2f000+1b5000]
>>
>>
>>
>> Any advice?
>> Thanks,
>> -Thomas
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> BLUG mailing list
>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

--
http://resc.smugmug.com/

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Fwd: possible causes of segfaults

2009-12-21T13:33:00.000-08:00

Did you upgrade the system without rebooting it? (That should be
reproducible, though.) Are you using a version of ImageMagick compiled
for a different distribution of Linux? (I know a lot of RPM-based
systems do not bundle a lot of programs.)

If you downloaded an RPM that wasn't compiled specifically for your
distribution/version, I would expect that to be the cause of the
problem. If that's the cause of the problem, building it from source
should clear it up.

If you're using the version of ImageMagick that comes with your
distribution and you've not recently performed an upgrade, memory
corruption seems the most likely candidate. Does that machine have
unparitied memory? Any type of memory other than unparitied would likely
show an error instead of just producing bogus data. (It is why I hate
unparitied memory.)

It could also be a CPU fault.

Problems with hard drives tend to show up as errors with the specific
media. (It'll list the device producing the error.) Hardware problems
regarding media do not normally produce segfaults, unless the
application fails to handle the error case.

My recommendation: Pick an upcoming weekend and tell them the services
of this machine will be unavailable. Then start the memory test at
5:15pm (adjusted for the end of your workday) and run a memory checker
all weekend. Then come in 15 minutes early on Monday to check for errors
and reboot the system.

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 03:58:40PM -0500, Thomas Smith wrote:
> Hiya,
>
> I just installed a new file / computation server at my work, and a few
> days into its tenure, I've started noticing some segfaults.
>
> For instance, I was running a bunch of image processing jobs, and
> ImageMagick's "convert" program segfaulted. I ran it again on the
> same data, and it did fine. So I'm wondering if I have bad hardware,
> or bad libraries, or what?
>
> Possible causes of segmentation faults that I know of:
> Hardware --- could be very random and difficult to find, might need to
> totally shut down the server and run a memory tester for days in order
> to find.
>
> Filesystem corruption --- should be reproducible, right? if "convert"
> segfaults once, it should do it again...
>
> Libraries / os problems --- should be reproducible too, right?
>
>
>
> from dmesg:
> [17217.872070] ld[16027]: segfault at 0 ip 00002ae3b445411b sp
> 00007fffc39a74e8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2ae3b43d0000+168000]
> [17354.753195] ld[20115]: segfault at 0 ip 00002b832843d11b sp
> 00007fff729f2fa8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2b83283b9000+168000]
> [19463.265457] ld[3673]: segfault at 0 ip 00002ad2f7a3a11b sp
> 00007fffd11023a8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2ad2f79b6000+168000]
> [19474.653491] ld[3680]: segfault at 0 ip 00002b7f10f0e11b sp
> 00007fffbac8a978 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2b7f10e8a000+168000]
> [19507.935271] ld[3687]: segfault at 0 ip 00002af5c9eb511b sp
> 00007fff12fe00d8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2af5c9e31000+168000]
> [19528.740436] ld[3701]: segfault at 0 ip 00002b265616a11b sp
> 00007fff2ceb8d98 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2b26560e6000+168000]
> [19606.865585] ld[3754]: segfault at 0 ip 00002ae3a079811b sp
> 00007fff6bc4d3c8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2ae3a0714000+168000]
> [263529.064795] convert[24941]: segfault at 7fffd973b6b8 ip
> 00007fffdb1e2ed9 sp 00007fffd973b660 error 7 in
> libMagickCore.so.1.0.0[7fffdb0fe000+1b5000]
> [268495.776398] convert[28595]: segfault at 7fffc7e2b608 ip
> 00007fffc9e13ed9 sp 00007fffc7e2b5b0 error 7 in
> libMagickCore.so.1.0.0[7fffc9d2f000+1b5000]
>
>
>
> Any advice?
> Thanks,
> -Thomas
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

[BLUG] Fwd: possible causes of segfaults

2009-12-21T12:58:00.001-08:00

Hiya,

I just installed a new file / computation server at my work, and a few
days into its tenure, I've started noticing some segfaults.

For instance, I was running a bunch of image processing jobs, and
ImageMagick's "convert" program segfaulted. I ran it again on the
same data, and it did fine. So I'm wondering if I have bad hardware,
or bad libraries, or what?

Possible causes of segmentation faults that I know of:
Hardware --- could be very random and difficult to find, might need to
totally shut down the server and run a memory tester for days in order
to find.

Filesystem corruption --- should be reproducible, right? if "convert"
segfaults once, it should do it again...

Libraries / os problems --- should be reproducible too, right?

from dmesg:
[17217.872070] ld[16027]: segfault at 0 ip 00002ae3b445411b sp
00007fffc39a74e8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2ae3b43d0000+168000]
[17354.753195] ld[20115]: segfault at 0 ip 00002b832843d11b sp
00007fff729f2fa8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2b83283b9000+168000]
[19463.265457] ld[3673]: segfault at 0 ip 00002ad2f7a3a11b sp
00007fffd11023a8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2ad2f79b6000+168000]
[19474.653491] ld[3680]: segfault at 0 ip 00002b7f10f0e11b sp
00007fffbac8a978 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2b7f10e8a000+168000]
[19507.935271] ld[3687]: segfault at 0 ip 00002af5c9eb511b sp
00007fff12fe00d8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2af5c9e31000+168000]
[19528.740436] ld[3701]: segfault at 0 ip 00002b265616a11b sp
00007fff2ceb8d98 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2b26560e6000+168000]
[19606.865585] ld[3754]: segfault at 0 ip 00002ae3a079811b sp
00007fff6bc4d3c8 error 4 in libc-2.9.so[2ae3a0714000+168000]
[263529.064795] convert[24941]: segfault at 7fffd973b6b8 ip
00007fffdb1e2ed9 sp 00007fffd973b660 error 7 in
libMagickCore.so.1.0.0[7fffdb0fe000+1b5000]
[268495.776398] convert[28595]: segfault at 7fffc7e2b608 ip
00007fffc9e13ed9 sp 00007fffc7e2b5b0 error 7 in
libMagickCore.so.1.0.0[7fffc9d2f000+1b5000]

Any advice?
Thanks,
-Thomas

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] power off CD?

2009-12-21T09:22:00.001-08:00

On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 08:19:44AM -0500, David Ernst wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 11:27:21PM -0500, Steven Black wrote:
> >On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 01:11:29AM -0500, David Ernst wrote:
> >> So, we put the CD into the CD drive of my Ubuntu (Jaunty)
> >> machine... it spins up, and ... my computer turns off. power off. As
> >> if our power had gone out, but it hadn't.
> >
> >You should check the kernel logs. (/var/log/dmesg.*)
>
> I thought the dmesg logs wrote only boot-up info..? I took a look and
> didn't see anything, any clues on what you think I should be looking
> for?

After boot up the kernel writes logs to a pipe and either syslog-ng
or klogd will read from the pipe and write to a file. It should cover
issues that crop up after boot.

This log gets rotated at boot, so an 'ls -al dmesg*' will show you the
dates and times of the last write to each log. That can be used to find
the correct file, then look at the last line or so.

I don't know about your distribution, but my distro time-stamps each line
with time-since-boot information (in seconds?). This allows you to look
for the jump from boot time to post-boot messages.

However, if it was the CMOS/BIOS causing the shutdown (as I have seen
before) it is unlikely there will be any meaningful entries in the log.

> >Powering off is unusual. Now, kernel halting due to some hardware issue,
> >that's a lot more common.
>
> Agreed. But would the computer really turn off its power on a kernel
> panic?

Not normally, no.

I believe there is logic in place to prevent kernel dead-locks which
may reboot the system -- I thought it performed a reboot and didn't
shut it down, though.

Such an incident would be flagged in the kernel log.

> >I've seen low-level errors power off machines before. If you have logs
> >available in your CMOS/BIOS settings that may shine some light on it.
>
> next time I reboot, I'll try to take a look. :) I don't remember
> ever seeing such a thing, though.

These logs are fairly common for server hardware, but rare for
desktop/laptop hardware. Look for anything with "Log" in the name. Just
a forewarning, sometimes these are not directly human-readiable and just
contain time-stamps and hex numbers.

Cheers,
Steven Black

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] power off CD?

2009-12-21T05:19:00.000-08:00

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 11:27:21PM -0500, Steven Black wrote:
>On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 01:11:29AM -0500, David Ernst wrote:
>> So, we put the CD into the CD drive of my Ubuntu (Jaunty)
>> machine... it spins up, and ... my computer turns off. power off. As
>> if our power had gone out, but it hadn't.
>
>You should check the kernel logs. (/var/log/dmesg.*)

I thought the dmesg logs wrote only boot-up info..? I took a look and
didn't see anything, any clues on what you think I should be looking
for?

>Powering off is unusual. Now, kernel halting due to some hardware issue,
>that's a lot more common.

Agreed. But would the computer really turn off its power on a kernel
panic?

>I've seen low-level errors power off machines before. If you have logs
>available in your CMOS/BIOS settings that may shine some light on it.

next time I reboot, I'll try to take a look. :) I don't remember
ever seeing such a thing, though.

David
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] power off CD?

2009-12-20T20:27:00.001-08:00

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 01:11:29AM -0500, David Ernst wrote:
> So, we put the CD into the CD drive of my Ubuntu (Jaunty)
> machine... it spins up, and ... my computer turns off. power off. As
> if our power had gone out, but it hadn't.

You should check the kernel logs. (/var/log/dmesg.*)

Powering off is unusual. Now, kernel halting due to some hardware issue,
that's a lot more common.

I've seen low-level errors power off machines before. If you have logs
available in your CMOS/BIOS settings that may shine some light on it.

Cheers,
Steven Black

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] power off CD?

2009-12-20T14:26:00.001-08:00

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 11:50:46AM -0600, Beartooth wrote:
>On Fri, 18 Dec 2009, David Ernst wrote:
>
>> So, my wife Priscilla makes a copy of a data CD. Some friends
>> are in the psychology dept at IU, and she volunteered for an
>> experiment and ended up with some kind of imaging info of her
>> brain. I don't think that's important to the story, but maybe.
>> Anyway, she drags a couple of extra files onto the disk in
>> Windows (Vista), and it's ready to give to her friend. She
>> said to me "can you put this in you computer and make sure that
>> it works?" Sure. [....]
>
> Would the psych department be doing scans using medical
>imaging?

Well, I'm a total outsider here, so I can't speak to exactly what they
are doing. But, they do these experiments where they put you in an
MRI machine (or something) and then ask you to do stuff (listen to
music, answer some questions, etc) and watch what happens in your
brain when you're thinking about it. In addition to the $50 or
whatever, they also give you a picture of your brain. :)

> I have CDs/DVDs of some scans made at local hospitals --
>MRIs and I disremember what else -- which I haven't managed to
>display with Fedora. They don't harm any machine I've tried them
>on, just fail to display imagery.

Yeah, I really don't think it's the images themselves... But I don't
know that.

David
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] power off CD?

2009-12-18T09:50:00.001-08:00

On Fri, 18 Dec 2009, David Ernst wrote:

> So, my wife Priscilla makes a copy of a data CD. Some friends
> are in the psychology dept at IU, and she volunteered for an
> experiment and ended up with some kind of imaging info of her
> brain. I don't think that's important to the story, but maybe.
> Anyway, she drags a couple of extra files onto the disk in
> Windows (Vista), and it's ready to give to her friend. She
> said to me "can you put this in you computer and make sure that
> it works?" Sure. [....]

Would the psych department be doing scans using medical
imaging?

I have CDs/DVDs of some scans made at local hospitals --
MRIs and I disremember what else -- which I haven't managed to
display with Fedora. They don't harm any machine I've tried them
on, just fail to display imagery.

Anyway, I asked on Novalug some months back. Before the
discussion got way beyond any savvy I'll ever have, I discovered
that there are now some (apparently very fancy) formats
specifically for medical imagery. I did not then hear of an app
that would "just work" for a home linux user; dunno what chance
any has appeared since. But the discussions might tell youss
guyss a lot more than they did me.

--
Beartooth Staffwright, Erstwhile Historian of Tongues
Sclerotic Squirreler, Double Retiree, Linux Evangelist
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug