Re: Annoyances contribution from LJ

On Sat, 17 Dec 2005, LJ wrote:

> 2.  I've had a hard time seeing a correspondence between system menu 
> selections and what program or programs actually run.   The only ones that 
> make any sense are Firebird and Thunderbird.  If you select Applications, 
> Internet, Email, you get Evolution.  A fine program but I prefer Thunderbird. 
> Someday I'll know how to change things so that selecting Email invokes 
> Thunderbird.  And where are the .exe equivalents located??? There must be a 
> thunderbird executable somewhere.

To answer your questions in reverse order, binaries (as we call
'executables' here in UNIXland) can be located anywhere, but it's
conventional to put them in directories included in the $PATH environment
variable. Typical places include /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin,
/usr/X11R6/bin, /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/sbin. If you read the
Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, it'll give you the full gen.

Both KDE and Gnome desktop environments use .desktop files that define menu
entries. Thunderbird's is
/usr/share/applications/mozilla-thunderbird.desktop, evolution's is
/usr/share/applications/redhat-evolution.desktop. The desktop files specify,
amongst other things, the menu name, the tooltip information, the icon, the
path to the executable (and any parameters) and so on.

To find binaries, you can start up a terminal window and run, for example

 	$ which thunderbird
 	/usr/bin/thunderbird

To find which packages (RPMs on RH-alike and SuSe systems) provide that
binary, you can do

 	$ rpm -qf /usr/bin/thunderbird

To find all the other files provided by the same package that provides a
particular file, you can do

 	$ rpm -qlf /usr/bin/thunderbird

The output can be piped into grep, less and friends to ease comprehension.

> 3. I use two analog monitors monitors , one attached to the digital output 
> with a dongle and one to the regular vga output of my graphics card.  NVidia 
> supplied a nice driver which gave me the capability of expanding my desktop 
> to cover both monitors.  However,  I did a yum update and didn't realize the 
> significance of upgrading the kernel.  I'm now at 2.6 141.1653smp(from 1644) 
> and my carefully crafted dual monitor desktop has crashed.  Ok, no problem 
> so I'll just go through nvidia's scrip again as they suggest on their website 
> run  "sh NV*.run".  But this says "You appear to be running the X server..." 
> Couldn't they say "You appear to be running the X Server... In a terminal 
> window,  enter "su - root" and give your root password.  Then enter init 
> (insert number here)  and run the command "sh NV*.run" from the command line 
> prompt.

You can shutdown X on RH-like systems by switching to a Virtual Terminal
(using CTRL+ALT+Fn where n is 1-6, typically), logging in as root, then
using

 	# exec telinit 3

BTW, the fault here isn't with Linux, but rather with nVidia. Rather than
fitting in with the standard FOSS development process and contributing
either programming information or their driver source code to the kernel and
Xorg/XFree respectively, nVidia choose to keep their code private and only
release some large object files and some glue code that must be rebuilt
every time the kernel or X is changed. Just as many of Windows' infamous
stability problems are down to bad third party drivers, much of Linux's
current issues with administration/installation are down to uncooperative
hardware manufacturers. Incidentally, binary drivers like nVidia and ATI's
may stop working with future releases of the Linux kernel as a result of
this policy. For this reason, and ease of administration, I recommend that
users stick to hardware devices that are fully supported by 100% FOSS
drivers whenever this is feasible. Currently, the fastest graphics card
supported by FOSS drivers under Linux/X is the Radeon 9250/9200 with the
r300 chips making progress through reverse engineering.

> Larry

HTH,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>