Damn Small Linux - Not!

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

Loaded DSL-n 01RC2 on a LiveCD. It works pretty good.

Pros:
/var filling up quickly is fixed. Thank you. I finally get to try out apt-get.

That workspace switcher that was usually in the bottom left corner is gone. Thank you. That was a waste of space, and sometimes it would show up in a random corner, covering up fluxter, slit, or worse, aterm icon.

In RC1, my computer would sometimes freeze with my wireless network turned on. aMule would freeze my computer within minutes. I have a Linksys WUSB54Gv1 with latest windows drivers and ndiswrapper. My computer has yet to freeze in RC2. The ndiswrapper upgrade? Or maybe I just haven't given it enough time. I'll mention here if it does.

I like how the icons go horizontal instead of vertical. Don't know why I like it. It is just different.

xpdf now opens every pdf I throw at it. It still has redrawing problems tho, so I will continue to use the full xpdf extension when I need to view pdfs.

New Cons (these cons new to RC2):

Triangles no longer in the menu. Those were helpful.

alias l and la switched on us! I used to type "l" to get a long listing of everything in ~. Now, it's different. That wasn't nice.

I liked the green theme better. I know, it is still there, but I liked how there was an obvious visual difference between dsl and dsl-n. I should also note that if you change the theme back to green, the menu triangles come back.

Old Cons (these cons also present in RC1):

XVESA applet not having any buttons for my nvidia based card is not fixed. Roberts said it wouldn't be, that there was nothing he could do. No evidence to the contrary here.

I dislike how "cp" is an alias for "cp -i". If I ever want to use "cp -f", I first have to remove that alias. I don't see any reason for it being there in the first place. I would have mentioned this before today, but I didn't notice it causing problems until yesterday.

DSL-n has less built in samba than DSL. That just seems strange to me.

Really old kernel. nuf said.

Finally, you released RC2 about 2 days after I did a frugal install of RC1. Shame on you for such poor timing.

Penumbra · Joined: 19 May 2006 Posts: 13

Not really trying to be picky BUT..

rm / mv are always (when you have system-wide 'root' access) aliased to add ' -i'
I don't mind the addition of cp to the list really as it does have stability and security implications.

If you want to use the raw command, not the alias, simply enclose the command in single quotes and it will bypass the alias.

EG:
rm -rf /
rm: remove directory `/'?

becomes:

'rm' -rf /
.. kablam ..

No need to remove aliases!

Hope this helps.

P

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

Ironically, "rm -rf /" works fine, regardless of alias. "mv -f ...." also successfully forces a overwrite move. You don't need to escape either of these. "cp -f *.iso /mnt/hda6/backup", however, the -f is ignored. I say ironically, becasue of rm, mv, and cp, cp is probably the least harmless. Not saying you can't use it to destroy a perfectly good system, but still.

Also, what are you referring to when you say "system wide root access?" I was talking about dsl's aliases, not roots. Although the same goes for root as for dsl.

I agree that forcing interactive, regardless of command line preference for cp makes a system slightly harder to destroy. I don't have to like the addition of cp though.

Thanks for the tip anyway. It actually isn't required for rm or mv. I probably won't use it much for cp, or maybe not at all, because for multiple commands it would be more work. Thanks anyway.

Penumbra · Joined: 19 May 2006 Posts: 13

In a DSL-N system, there's little difference between the DSL and the root users, afaict.

P

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

Actually, compared to the protection of ignoring cp -f, the protection of running as dsl vs root is enormously massive.

[IDC]Dragon · Joined: 22 Apr 2006 Posts: 41 Location: Hannover, Germany

Hi,
(big cheers for Robert to come up with RC2, my hope for a recent kernel)

I've upgraded my home server CF card frugal installation to RC2 now. Being such a noob, it took me some time. First try was to just exchange the kernel, ramdisk and KNOPPIX archive, but too much got restored of the old home dir. Now I re-did it from scratch. (I didn't expect RC2 to solve the problems I have with it, since the kernel is still sooo old, but did it to give feedback and perhaps get apt_get to work, thanks to unionfs)

The F2 and F3 help of the CD boot prompt teached me cheatcodes for FTP, NFS, SSH. Have those been there before? Anyway, great that I can try NFS server now (one of my issues is poor Samba performance), or ftp into the box once I find out how to setup ftp logins.

I get an alerting output during boot. It dosn't happen with plain CD start, but once I bring restore and myDSL into the game. Can try to narrow it down, on request. This is the tail of my dmesg:
(the system seems running, however)

[code:1]
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 000000ac
printing eip:
f8f748d3
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000 [#1]
PREEMPT SMP
Modules linked in: af_packet via82cxxx_audio uart401 sound soundcore ac97_codec via_velocity crc_ccitt via_agp agpgart i2c_viapro i2c_core parport_pc parport 8250 serial_core usbhid pcmcia yenta_socket rsrc_nonstatic pcmcia_core video thermal processor fan container button battery ac genrtc unionfs cloop sbp2 ohci1394 ieee1394 usb_storage ohci_hcd uhci_hcd usbcore
CPU: 0
EIP: 0060:[<f8f748d3>] Not tainted VLI
EFLAGS: 00010202 (2.6.12)
EIP is at unionfs_file_revalidate+0x123/0x77c [unionfs]
eax: 00000000 ebx: 00000001 ecx: 00000000 edx: f7898b40
esi: f621cfbc edi: 00000001 ebp: f7844090 esp: dfd79f40
ds: 007b es: 007b ss: 0068
Process exportfs (pid: 2531, threadinfo=dfd78000 task=f7a20540)
Stack: 00000000 00000000 f621cfbc 00000000 c03d0380 f7844090 f7818600 f7b2ce00
f7b2ce00 f79bcac0 f7b2ce00 f8f757c8 f7b2ce00 00000001 f7b2ce00 00000000
f79bcac0 f7b2ce00 c0154f2f f7b2ce00 f79bcac0 00000003 f79bcac4 c0154fa1
Call Trace:
[<f8f757c8>] unionfs_flush+0x10/0xc0 [unionfs]
[<c0154f2f>] filp_close+0x4f/0x68
[<c0154fa1>] sys_close+0x59/0x70
[<c010356d>] syscall_call+0x7/0xb
Code: 0f 88 93 01 00 00 8b 6c 24 14 8b 45 4c 8b 80 90 01 00 00 8b 50 20 89 c8 c1 e0 04 f6 44 02 0c 02 74 15 8b 46 2c 8b 04 88 8b 40 10 <8b> 80 ac 00 00 00 f6 40 34 01 74 6d 8b 44 24 30 8b 50 08 8b 42
<6>apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x07 (Driver version 1.16ac)
apm: overridden by ACPI.
apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x07 (Driver version 1.16ac)
apm: disabled on user request.
[/code:1]

Is this a unionfs failure? I read somewhere the Klaus Knopper had to delay his Knoppix5 release because a unionfs bugfix was necessary. That may explain the "odd" version coming with Knoppix5, which looks like a february cvs snapshot. Dunno if our version has that, too, can't find release notes. File date of 1.1.4 is april 11th, looks comforting.
Jörg

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

Hey!!

This is mine!!! You can't have it!! Mad

[IDC]Dragon · Joined: 22 Apr 2006 Posts: 41 Location: Hannover, Germany

@Winter Knight: sorry, what?

A follow-up: I found that the "exportfs -a" command in my bootlocal.h throws a segmentation fault. When I comment that out, it boots fine.

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

[quote="[IDC]Dragon"]@Winter Knight: sorry, what?[/quote]

This is my user feedback thread. Rather than starting your own, you replied to mine, and wrote your own inside it. I would appreciate it if you would:

1) Go to

2) Click on "new topic" button.

3) Copy and paste your feedback from here into YOUR new topic.

4) When you've got your own topic with your feedback in order, come back here and edit your posts to say, "Please disregard, posted in wrong thread", or something of that nature.

When you make your own feedback thread, it makes it easier for the developers and others to determine who said what about dsl-n and who has what problems with it. It also makes it easier for people who have workarounds or replies to problems to address the right person.

Penumbra · Joined: 19 May 2006 Posts: 13

Oooh! A flaming turf war, nobody step on it -- you never know what's inside!!!

Twisted Evil

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

I wouldn't call it a war. At least not yet, and I hope it doesn't escalate to something like that.

I was trying to be nice. Those demons and frowny faces and exclamation points were more of a joke. I sometimes forget that it is often difficult to inflect tone on written media. Really, I wasn't trying to be hostile.

Anyway, this thread is so convoluted now, that I'm going to have to start another anyway to share the rest of my feedback coherently. Oh well.