DSL Talk

Can I ask for help here?
Well.. anyway... Why ask if I'm going to....!

I just bought a pen drive today, and remembered DSL can save/restore settings on it... So I've downloaded DSL current (1.2.1 I think) and burn a CD. OK booted.. OK. Now I want to save my settings on my pen drive... I can mount it OK... /dev/sda1, I did a mke2fs -j /dev/sda1... OK ext3 FS on it... My guess is that I have to go to System -> Backup/Restore to save my settings... right? It asks for a device, I tried: /dev/sda, /dev/sda1, mounted it, /mnt/sda1, and It just hanged, I discovered that on tty1 it gives a msg like "Invalid device /dev/sda" for all my attempts... What am I missing here?

I am going to start trimming help questions in here. If you need help go to the IRC channel or, better yet, go to the forums.

It may be trivial to those of you who've been tide to something stronger/more dangerous, but today I am kicking caffeine out of my system.

It was getting ridiculous, to the point where I need 12 cups of coffee a day just to keep from getting a splitting headache. So, today I quite. I had my last cup 18 hours ago. I am doing all right so far, I'm just taking Tylenol for the headache and I've been wanting to sleep a lot.

I downloaded DSL at the office today and burned the bootable CD on my antique Dell computers. I booted DSL and loaded it all into RAM.. dang, even on my PII 366 that puppy was QUICK.

Loving this already and wanting extensions I sent my lovely assistant ( the company owner actually ) to get me a 1GB USB stick. They didn't carry them so she got me a 512M stick.

Took all my toys home and plugged in the memory stick into the antique ( PII 400 ) Dell Laptop and lit it off.

Problem #1 I want /home to be on the USB stick.. hmmm hack or post to the DSL site ?

Problem #2 Maybe put the whole shebang on the USB stick and save all my data there but I'd have to boot into WinBlow$ first ..

I just want to say hi to everyone and I am enjoying DSL very much.

-lzy

I was thinking about my last entry and perhaps this one should have come first to make thing clearer. I was trying to show the use of sed for solving a problem. I wanted an example that was complex but still understandable. I was looking for a way to show how to explain the use of pattern and hold buffers in sed. I don't think that's what I got.

The pattern buffer contains the current line. It's what the "s" command performs its replacements to. The hold buffer is another buffer you can use. There are 5 commands (g G h H x) that move thing to and from the hold buffer. You can choose between appending to a buffer or overwriting the buffer. H appends the pattern buffer to the hold buffer, h overwrites the hold buffer with the pattern buffer, G appends the hold buffer to the pattern buffer, and g overwrites the pattern buffer with the hold buffer. x exchanges the hold and pattern buffers

I've been working on a sawfish window manager.dsl, and I made a .sawfish file that makes a few of the menu items, but I thought it would be nice to have a fluxbox menu converter (or at least an outline that others could use as well. I played around in sed and I got something that works so I thought I'd share the code, the results, and the sorrows.

The sawfish menu entries, like ion's, are in a different order than fluxbox's. The submenus must be fully defined before they are called by their owner. I looked at bash and C, but for whatever reason, I could see the answer in sed.

My basic strategy was to clean up the file a bit, then use the two buffers in sed to my advantage. Since sed is good at pattern matching, I thought I could use the next read [end] statement to tell me that the last [submenu] in the hold buffer was ready for writing. Then I would write that submenu out and replace everything in the hold buffer past that point with the call to the newly created submenu. Then when the next [end] comes around, you have everything set up. [exec] entries get reformatted and appended to the hold buffer.

I don't know if these blogs are the right place to ask questions?
I've managed to switch my keyboard layout to fi-latin1, which is great. The only problem is that I have to do this each time the system is restarted. How do I save my configuration changes?
By modifying filetool.lst? Modifying it how?
Also, the command startx wipes out all of Firefox's bookmarks, so I would have to add them everytime I change the keyboard layout. Not good.

I would also like to change the refresh rate, the size of the mouse cursor and the am/pm time display to a 24h clock. But these are all side-issues.

The "passed undefined mode number" problem is also quite annoying, and editing lilo.conf file doesen't help one bit: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/320298

Dear friends,
First of all, kudos to the DSL team for making a marvellous OS.I have the Live Cd Distro of Damn Small Linux.Its really cool.I am able to learn a lot of unix commands from the xterm.But alas,i aint able to compile any of the programs that i type in vi editor
(eg: i created a sample file a.c
in the $ prompt i gave :$cc a.c
cc : command not found.... was the reply.)
now is it possible to compile c progams in DSL?
pls tell me!
Thanks

I've installed DSL to a hard disk and it works great.

However, when I cloned the hard disk and put it in a PC with different hardware configurations it seems to be pretty random at getting the video card working correctly.

The DSL live CD or clean install finds the new hardware just fine ?

Is the hardware auto-detection turned off once it's installed onto a hard disk? If so how can I turn it back on.

Thanks for any help !

Mac
New Zealand.