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Greetings,

I ma not sure if this is a DSL issue or QEMU issue:

Using an HP Mini (10in screen) and launching DSL through QEMU, the QEMU Screen is too large and no way to Resize. If I need the taskbar or minimize any application I can no longer see it in the taskbar as it is well below the lower edge of the screen. (width is OK)

Any ideas greatly appreciated.

S

1. SMART failure. The drive firmware itself reports it is bad. This can be detected with Linux tools (none that I am aware of are included in Damn Small Linux). Unfortunately, older drives don't support SMART.

You may want to check out the Ultimate Boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/), it has a good assortment of disk diagnostics, several of which do read SMART data, and others that can do other things. Also includes some of the manufacturer's diags too. And yes, DOS-like shells to look around at the disk contents if it is healthy enough to support that.

2. Bad sectors. If SMART doesn't exist or isn't enabled on the drive, these can often only be found during a full format or read/write surface scan. You could test a hard drive that you don't have data on by doing

Code:

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hdX bs=512k

but may take awhile. A fast computer/drive should be able to do about 2 GB a minute; I wouldn't even want to guess how it'd do on a 486.

If you are trying to identify bad sectors you probably want bs=512 without the "k" here, add a "count=2M" for each GB of drive size... but still expect it to be slow.

You could get it to run substantially faster by substituting /dev/zero (alternately prepare a small file to use repeatedly instead) for /dev/random... the constant takes minimal compute cycles, while "random" is a fairly compute intensive algorithm, bad enough on a Pentium but would be really horrendous on a 486.

After that, the time needed depends somewhat on the chipset/bios and what transfer modes are supported. On my 486DX50 (bios limits it to mode 2) it took 50.3 hours to zero a 80GB drive... that's somewhat less than 2GB/hour, nevermind per minute. Also note that DSL seems limited to 32GB and could not do the entire drive, I had to use ttylinux, see my other post. It might be worth some googling to find a distro that includes ddrescue, it has special options for dealing with damaged drives.

3. Electrical failure / bad firmware. Since the drive won't be detectable, there's no way for Linux to detect that it is bad.

Depending on the make/model of drive and what its problem is, sometimes the manufacturer's diagnostic can do some testing even when BIOS can't see it, this can be worth a try. Check their website for details or try UBCD.

a few more. Higher quality here: http://www.mediafire.com/?grbbduc1h4ov6af,mdly44reg8k89h0,vzckbks798aqzq4,ck693i27ppu4udl,zqbb4ksbg9xoixp,0q0p8e5btsgelh9,giwbsx7f4mi97a4

new backgrounds. Higher quality here: http://www.mediafire.com/?grbbduc1h4ov6af,mdly44reg8k89h0,vzckbks798aqzq4,ck693i27ppu4udl,zqbb4ksbg9xoixp,0q0p8e5btsgelh9,giwbsx7f4mi97a4

Ive always had an interest...no obsession with computers, however I didnt really pursue my passion outside of fixing end user problems in the butt of windows OS. I have ADD so befor my medication reading through lists and lists of of ...stuff... to figure out how to actually accomplish somthing I couldnt through trial and error. So now happily medicated I can actually sit down and read a little bit...at least more than I was. Well I have a dell d600 that my church donated to me (yes I LOVE God), but the admin was locked out. I dont have internet access outside of a few min at mcdonalds, so I needed an OS that is small and upgradeable. I tried tinycore, but that was a bit to small...then I tried DSL. I like it because it has bugs, but they are simple enough to try to solve...it makes me more hands on, which means after typing the same commands over and over and trying to figure out which ones I need, I have learned much in a very short amount of time.

All that ramble was just to say thank you for such a unique workable system, that is really fun to learn linux with.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of ways a hard drive can be "broken." The three main ways are:

1. SMART failure. The drive firmware itself reports it is bad. This can be detected with Linux tools (none that I am aware of are included in Damn Small Linux). Unfortunately, older drives don't support SMART.
2. Bad sectors. If SMART doesn't exist or isn't enabled on the drive, these can often only be found during a full format or read/write surface scan. You could test a hard drive that you don't have data on by doing

Code:

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hdX bs=512k

but may take awhile. A fast computer/drive should be able to do about 2 GB a minute; I wouldn't even want to guess how it'd do on a 486.
3. Electrical failure / bad firmware. Since the drive won't be detectable, there's no way for Linux to detect that it is bad.

There's also the fourth way, the horrific click of death, but most people should be able to hear it.

DSL is great!   My eMachines eOne (64mb RAM)  got on to work. I can enjoy FLAC songs with mPlayer.  I can read my mail,  work on gnumeric.. DSL has all I need.

Hello
I'm running dsl on a Pentium 3, 666mhz processer with 356mb on RAM.
I want to copy a layer on a series of jpg-images (that I saved from a video in avidemux) , but everytime I open a bash and  type: gimp  -b[]file> , it says "batch command experienced  an execution error".
I'm having Gimp 1.2 from out of the "mydsl" directory, and normaly this should work with video->frames modify->duplicate layer, i think. But it will not.
Maybe someone can help me out here.



Hello again
Is there anyone who can run batch mode from gimp in dsl anyway?
It can't be so difficult, I think it must be a (java)-script like a project in Avidemux.

In the meanwhile I have installed Python from Synaptic, together  with a script from the net (recipe 496897-1.py) , but they do'nt seem to match totally.
Maybe someone can hand me a plug-in, module, or script with instructions to make it binary and install it to usr, lib, gimp, ...

Thanks.


I found the solution myself already.
In the menu "video=>move paths" I can do exactly what I wanted.

I don't know what might be available for DSL, but "ophcrack" is a live CD for just that sort of scenario.

Hi guys!

If someone could help me, as explained in the dsl4x forum topic "speech synthesis & recognition", i made a "fast prototyping" murgalua 0.5.5 application script which is fully operating in French (not much tested in US-English, but i'm "natively" French, so my US-English accent is horrible!) in a DSL-NOT powered system.
Other systems are fully functional like MS-Windows XP, (MS W2K is not compatible with pocketsphinx), Debian4 (recognition engine is CMU-Sphinx2, present in the default repositories). These OS are supporting MBrola voices for espeak speech synthesis output...

So, i ask for your help for these two problems:

- searching, including and testing a good US-English language model for "Alfreid.lua" script (both versions Sphinx2 & pocketphinx)

- enabling MBrola support for DSL-Not (i tested espeak with default "robotic" voices, but no way for making the system speak with mbrola voices, "piping" the output of espeak to mbrola, then to alsaplayer (aplay). aplay is not present in the default install of DSL-N, i could notice that default sound driver was OSS (not compatible to my knowledge with espeak)

Once done, backporting to DSL 4x (Sphinx2 is in the default woody repositories) should be interesting...
Take a look at my homesite, where you will find all needed info and scripts (updated this 26/02/2013)

http://michelterras.perso.sfr.fr/index.html?n=15

Script Alfreid.lua includes a diagnostic part which will help you finding what's missing for a fully usage (either data or binary, Linux or Windows)

Greetings from France to all of you DSL & DSL-N users!

Long live DSL and DSL-Not!