Subject: Linux-Development Digest #273
From: Digestifier <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 94 05:13:12 EDT

Linux-Development Digest #273, Volume #2          Fri, 7 Oct 94 05:13:12 EDT

Contents:
  de620 and Compaq aero, rx_page problem ? (Jan van Oorschot)
  Re: [Q] SLIP/PPP and modems with large internal buffers (Brad Midgley)
  Re: 3Com 509 Driver Problems - Any fixes - Help (Serge Audenaert)
  Re: Status of Mac Linux & PPC Linux? (Zack T. Smith)
  Re: Odd floppy sector size? (Holger Petersen)
  Re: DOSEMU question (Uwe Bonnes)
  Re: Does linux implement semaphores? (Peter Mutsaers)
  Re: [email-masked] (Rob Janssen)
  Re: Beautifying Linux/Xfree (Alexandra Griffin)
  Re: SCSI tape driver problem (Eyal Lebedinsky)
  Re: PROBLEM: Adaptec 1542 with SMC-Ultra (Michael Krause)
  Xfree 3.1 and SPEA MirageP64 (Linux) (Christoph Martin)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Jan van Oorschot)
Subject: de620 and Compaq aero, rx_page problem ?
Date: 6 Oct 1994 18:21:33 GMT

Hi,

I'am trying to get a de620 pocket adapter running on a compaq contura
aero 4/25. The system consequently works (pl51), but /var/adm/syslog
fills up with messages 

        Page link out of sync
        Run overrun

Some study of de620.c shows that both messages concern the page-count
the adapter returns, which is found to be inconsistent by the driver.

i was wandering about a few things:

        - is it possible that there is more memory in my DLINK-620 
          adapter then in the one owned by the writer of the driver ?

        - could the problem be caused by a defect/slow parallel port ?

        - does anyone already solved this problem, if not, i'll have
          a go.

ps. the system can communicate over the adapter, by the network
becomes a mess. For example, ping reports a lot of DUP's 

thanx,

Jan

-- 
-- Jan van Oorschot               --- Email: [email-masked] --
-- Data Network Performance Analysis Project                               --
-- CARDIT, Delft University of Technology ------------ Tel: (31)-15-786179 --
-- P.O.Box 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands ------ Fax: (31)-15-784898 --

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Brad Midgley)
Crossposted-To: comp.dcom.modems,comp.protocols.tcp-ip,comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc
Subject: Re: [Q] SLIP/PPP and modems with large internal buffers
Date: 6 Oct 1994 15:58:16 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
John Richardson <[email-masked]> wrote:
>I'm trying to debug some software IP TOS queuing (under linux)
>and have a hardware question just to make sure I'm not totally
>off base:

>Several people, including myself, have modems with large internal
>buffers (mine is a supra internal FAXmodem 1.44) which we use
>with SLIP and PPP.  The problem is, when we start an ftp
>download transfer in the background the interactive response
>becomes very poor.

Also, does anyone have a modem which has a configuration to

        reduce the send buffer size
        lower the flow-control bit sooner (when the send buffer
                reaches x bytes)

This is the type of requirement which I don't think many manufacturers
have anticipated, so I doubt it's common.  But since the newest
fastest modems are more and more used for SLIP/PPP _maybe_ it has been
considered for those.

-- 

Brad

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Serge Audenaert)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.help
Subject: Re: 3Com 509 Driver Problems - Any fixes - Help
Date: 6 Oct 1994 19:07:34 GMT

You can maybe try to reconfigure your card to some other
interrupt settings using the DOS tool that probably came
with it.

I tried a 3C509 and 3C503 on LINUX and they both work fine
using IRQ5 and base 0x300.
I use the slackware version 2.0.0.

Serge

------------------------------

Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.help
From: [email-masked] (Zack T. Smith)
Subject: Re: Status of Mac Linux & PPC Linux?
Date: Wed, 5 Oct 1994 23:45:46 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Wade Maxfield) writes:
>In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Zack T. Smith) writes: 
>

>>5. To get Linux running you can't use high level Mac OS calls; doing so
>>   would alleviate the need for the Linux OS.
>
>       *IMHO*, not really.  I ported CP/M 68K to the Mac ...
>
>Wade

FYI,

Some guy posted a message to the Linux activists mailing list recently
saying that they had committed themselves to finishing the port before
January. He said that he had nothing else to do during that period.

Personally I'm beginning to wonder whether it's worth the time and
effort it will take to port Linux to the Mac. The hardware is continually
changing, the CPU has changed.... The only thing we're guaranteed are
a few Mac OS calls, and every so often those get revised as well.

IMHO, it would be a better strategy to just port all of the utils
and programs to the Mac instead of the actual OS, writing a library
of funcitons to make the Mac OS look like Unix. That's what I've
done for my C Shell (though that's a commercial product).

The only problem there is that Unix data types are different from
mac os types, e.g. the mac uses a 64 bit process signature, whereas Unix 
is 32.

Zack Smith

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Holger Petersen)
Subject: Re: Odd floppy sector size?
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 08:05:24 GMT

knaff@ngulu (Alain Knaff) writes:

>6 0x30  ===>  128 byte sectors (doesn't work yet...)

And it never will...

As far as I know, noone succeeded to convince the NEC 765-Chip
to read 128 Bytes/Sektor _in_Double_Density_. This was known
in good old CP/M - times... I owned a Floppy-controller with
the Western Digital Chip, and it was able to produce and read
such Disk's. The S-100 Board from JADE, one of many ALTOS-Formats
and a german Maker (Felltron) used such sectorsize on 8-Inch
DD-Disks. [see thr german magazine C'T 6/1985 page 120ff]
No CP/M-Diskformat I know of used more than 1024 B/S.
Some DOS Copy-protection used the higher sector-sizes.

In _Single_Density_ the NEC-Chip can well use 128 B/S. 

> Hope this helps,

It would be nice to get aquivalences of ANADISK / TELEDISK
and 22DISK to Linux...

> Alain

Greetings, Holger

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Uwe Bonnes)
Subject: Re: DOSEMU question
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 06:38:37 GMT

Douglas Rankin ([email-masked]) wrote:
>  I have a question. I have been able to get dosemu0.53 running with a
> diskiamge for c: I was wondering how I configure it in order for it
> to boot my dos drives which is /dev/sda. My linux is on /dev/sdb1.
> Any help would be appreciated. You can reply here or email me at the
> following:

>       [email-masked] or
>       [email-masked]

My config.sys on the hdimage:
files=30
buffers=5
stacks=0,0  
dos=high,umb
lastdrive=z
device=c:\ems.sys 
devicehigh=C:\EMUFS.SYS \${HOME}/dosd
devicehigh=C:\EMUFS.SYS /cd-rom R
devicehigh=C:\EMUFS.SYS / R
devicehigh=C:\EMUFS.SYS / R
rem ******************* Mouse Setup ************************
devicehigh=C:\MSCMOUSE.SYS /1/A1/E/I 
rem ********************************************************
shell=c:\command.com /e:512 /p
install=c:\lredir.exe c: LINUX\FS/<DOS-MOUNT-POINT>

You should mount your /dev/sda when booting
/etc/fstab:
...
/dev/sda2       /<DOS-MOUNT-POINT> msdos        (flags, see mount(8))
...

The last line gives an error message while booting, which you can ignore.
After that your autoexec.bat from /dev/sda it executed.

-- 
Uwe Bonnes  [email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Peter Mutsaers)
Subject: Re: Does linux implement semaphores?
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 21:50:04 GMT

>> On Fri, 30 Sep 1994 17:16:03 GMT, [email-masked] (Harald Milz) said:

  HM> In comp.os.linux.development, Neal Patrick Howland ([email-masked]) wrote:
  >> I was wondering in the standard linux develpment packages implemented
  >> a semaphore synchronization call.  If not, how do you synchronize two 
  >> processes to keep them from entering their critical sections at the same
  >> time?

  HM> Using named pipes is an elegant method to achieve this. 

I think useing simply system V semaphores (if compiled in into the
kernel) is more efficient and direct. See 'man 5 ipc' if you have the
Linux Programmers Manual man-pages installed.
-- 
Peter Mutsaers                  |  AT Computing bv,  P.O. Box 1428,
[email-masked]                    |  6501 BK  Nijmegen, The Netherlands
tel. work: +31 (0)80 527248     |
tel. home: +31 (0)3405 71093    |  "... En..., doet ie het al?"

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Rob Janssen)
Subject: Re: [email-masked]
Reply-To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 1994 17:31:45 GMT

In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Steven Buytaert) writes:

>Zack T. Smith ([email-masked]) wrote:
>: Can someone please tell me how to get taken _off_ the
>: linux activists mailing list? I can neither disconnect myself
>: from it, nor even _post_ to it. Consider:

>: 1. Sending mail to [email-masked] does nothing.
>: 2. Sending mail to [email-masked] doesn't work.
>:    The X-admin line always gets an error...  
>: 3. When I use the X-admin line to get taken off the list, it tells
>:    me that I'm not even ON the list.

> I just left the PPP and SOUND channel due to time constraints
> the following way, which is described in the help file I saved
> when I subscribed:

> mail to [email-masked]'
> no subject given
> line in body  'X-Mn-Key: leave ppp'   for the PPP channel
> line in body 'X-Mn-Key: leave sound'  for the sound channel

> I received 2 mails saying that I left the desired channel.
> Important note: you have to have the exact same address (casing etc)
> as when you subscribed !

But unfortunately you can't specify the address yourself.  It blindly
takes the address it finds in the From: line.  This loses badly when your
address has changed, or the translation of the From: address which happens
in the mail routers has changed.

I have experienced already two times that the only way to unsubscribe was
to write a message to the operator :-(

Mailing to the list should be no problem, though.

Rob
-- 
=========================================================================
| Rob Janssen                | AMPRnet:   [email-masked]           |
| e-mail: [email-masked]     | AX.25 BBS: PE1CHL@PI8UTR.#UTR.NLD.EU     |
=========================================================================

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Alexandra Griffin)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Beautifying Linux/Xfree
Date: 7 Oct 1994 07:31:12 GMT

In article <1994Oct5.141142.773@muvms6>,
Andy Bailey <[email-masked]> wrote [in c.o.l.misc]:
>[...]
>  
>  I think more users might be attracted to Linux, if some really nice
>out-of-box configs like this were available, as well as some new icons and
>fonts. Perhaps some scripts (maybe tcl/tk based) that allow easy
>addition/removal of icons from the desktop. (I know its simple just the edit
>the config file to add/remove stuff, but this would be better looking)
>
>  Its just a wild idea, but I'd like to hear from anyone whos interested as
>well

You may get some negative feedback from the die-hard functionality
over form crowd, but I'd say there's a lot of truth to what you're
saying-- cleaning up minor things like GUI look & feel *will* make the
X environment more appealing to a lot of people (maybe this is
unfortunate, but with all the "fluff" on a typical Mac/Windoze desktop
nowadays a lot of people expect this kind of thing...)

Some ideas along this line that I've thought about:

1) A mouse-driven tool for setting common X resource preferences would
be *very* helpful, even for experienced users (kind of a big project,
I know).  Hewlett-Packard workstations include this as part of the
HP-VUE desktop-- you can adjust window colors, background pixmaps,
speaker pitch & volume, screensaver status, etc. from a "control
panel"-like utility.  There are too many things under X that can be
configured only from the command line, which is not good (ideally both
a good GUI and command-line way of setting each option should exist).
        An extension of this idea might involve using GetWidetTree
calls to a selected application to find out what resources can be set
(like editres does), filtering out those that are obviously used only
internally, and providing some kind of nice front-end for altering
these (and saving them to .Xdefaults, which would be automatically
"xrdb -load'ed" on exiting the preferences tool).  HP-VUE even allows
some things to be changed on the fly in already-running clients, but I
think support for this has to be specially compiled into each client.
Maybe a drop-in replacement for some of the X shared libraries could
allow existing binaries to support this, though?

2) A better X file manager than what's currently out there (xfm &
xfilemanager are nice but not as easy to configure, easy to use, or
generally polished as one might like).  Maybe something that provided
essentially the same functionality as Mouseless Commander (the
text-based Norton Commander clone), but with a mouse-driven GUI? (&
provisions for icons if desired, scrollbars on the dual file selection
lists, real pulldown menus-- leave in the command line at the bottom,
though!).
        Well, you mentioned NextStep-- on second thought, something
similar to the wonderful NeXT Workspace Manager application would be
delightful to have.  For those who have never seen it, this program
(in its Browser mode) presents a group of side-by-side vertical
directory listings, with each column representing a level of the
directory hiearchy... selecting a subdir. name from one list opens a a
listing of that directory onto the column to the right.  It's very
similar to Xarchie's user interface (with the MultiList widget)-- the
column set scrolls horizontally so there's no limit to how deep you
can go.  Above each column, a single icon is shown for the selected
entry ("pouches" for directories, appropriate icons for other file
types), and above that is a "shelf" area where icons can be dragged to
for quick access or future use.  For copying/moving/linking, you can
either use the shelf as a temporary holding area or open multiple
browser windows at once...
        Workspace manager has other view-modes as well (Mac-like
window full of icons, detailed single-column directories...), but
Browser is the most unique.

3) Another idea from HP-VUE... this environment features a "console
bar" area at the bottom of the screen, containing buttons to switch
virtual desktops, invocation icons for commonly-used apps, small icons
for system functions (logging out...), and space for a clock,
calendar, Xload bargraph, & other stuff.  The appearance of the bar is
very professional, with little beveled insets for each item.  I'm
thinking that something similar could be done for fvwm by simply
creating a "wrapper" program that allows existing X apps to be run as
borderless, titlebarless child windows within its confines, creating
the nice bevels or whatever around each inset client.  Good clients to
embed might include xclock/dclock/oclock/whatever, xload, xmem,
xsysinfo, fvwm GoodStuff (for launching apps), the fvwm pager,
xpostit, etc. etc...
        For those like myself who have less screen resolution than
they want and like to conserve it ;-), another good feature this
"toolbar" app could provide would be to find the optimal geometries
for packing the configured child clients into as small an area as
possible, for a given overall rectangular area and position (and
minimum sizes for each child).  I have my .xsession set up to start
the fvwm pager, xpostit, xload, xsysinfo, and dclock (from
Interviews), all nicely packed together in the upper-left corner of
the desktop (borderless and "sticky").  Finding all the -geometry
AxB+C+D settings down to the pixel was kind of tedious, though, and
that's the kind of thing computers should be doing for us!  Options
for a decorative border a la HP-VUE around the area would be cool as
well.  Of course, this client should be configurable in a GUIish way
for user-friendliness, with the option to just edit an rc file for
experts...

Just thought I'd throw those ideas out-- things I've thought about
writing myself some day but probably won't for a while (until I learn
more about X programming at any rate...)

-- alex

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Eyal Lebedinsky)
Subject: Re: SCSI tape driver problem
Date:  3 Oct 94 21:58:42 GMT

In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Nils-Henner Krueger) writes:

>I've got an annoying problem with my scsi tape drive. 
>From other systems like Sun I'm used to put several archives on
>one tape by skipping the previously written archives with "mt fsf"
>and then writing the next one. When I do this on my linux system
>it constantly fails, regardless of which kernel I'm using.

>That's the drive specification as it is recognized by the kernel:

>That's what I try to do:

>/home/nhk> mt -f /dev/nrmt0 fsf 1
>/home/nhk> tar cvf /dev/nrmt0 doom
>doom/
>doom/doom1.wad
>tar: can't write to /dev/nrmt0 : I/O error
>/home/nhk> 

>And that's the debug output if I activate "#define DEBUG" in 
>/usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/st.c:

>st0: Block limits 512 - 512 bytes.

Not sure, but maybe you need to add '-b 1' to 'tar' so as to comply with
the 512 bytes block size limit?
--
Regards
        Eyal Lebedinsky         [email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Michael Krause)
Subject: Re: PROBLEM: Adaptec 1542 with SMC-Ultra
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 13:37:43 GMT

Vassili Leonov ([email-masked]) wrote:
: Juha Virtanen ([email-masked]) wrote:
: : >>>>> On 30 Sep 1994 11:51:36 GMT,
: : [email-masked] (Olaf Jaeger) said: 
: : :> problem:
: : :>  I am using an ISA-Adaptec-1542c and a SCSI-2-HD with an 
: : :> ext2-filesystem V. 0.5a on it. From the time that i put a 
: : :> SMC-Ultra into the machine, the filesystem on the HD begins to vanish.
: I have exactly 1542 running fine with SMC-Elite - and this is the only
: real true Western Digital 8013 these days. If you have a choice don't
: use SMC-Ultra... - use Elite16 from the same company.
: Vassili.

I used to have a SMC Elite 16 before I switched to the SMC Elite Ultra 16.
Both are running with no problems at all with my AHA-1542 C.
From what I read on Usenet, I think there were errors reported with _both_
cards by _some_ people. Others reported _no_ problems on either card...

So you still have the choice,
Michael

--
- Michael Krause
- E-Mail: [email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Christoph Martin)
Crossposted-To: comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.os.linux.admin
Subject: Xfree 3.1 and SPEA MirageP64 (Linux)
Date: 06 Oct 1994 13:42:22 GMT

README.S3 (in XF86-3.1-doc.tar.gz) says:

>1 - Supported hardware
>----------------------
>
>  ...
>
>S3 864, 20C498 RAMDAC, ICS2595 Clockchip
>                SPEA MirageP64 2MB DRAM
>
>                        8 and 15/16 bpp
>
>                        ClockChip "ICS2595"

I tried this in my XF86Config file. Die card ist probed correctly as
S3 864 with 20C486 RAMDAC. But the server can't set the clockchip.

What is the problem? Is it the right ClockChip statement? Has anyone
this card running with XFree 3.1?

Christoph

--
============================================================================
Christoph Martin, Zentrum für Datenverarbeitung, Uni-Mainz, Germany
Internet-Mail:  [email-masked]
   Paper-Mail:  C. Martin, Zentrum für Datenverarbeitung,
                Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität, 55099 Mainz, Germany
      Telefon:  +49 6131 396316

------------------------------

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End of Linux-Development Digest
******************************