• Easy LG browsing 2 cent tip
• vim hot color swapping
• linux version of dos commands
• Booting w/ CD-ROM
• dvi and Deskjet
• how to find an i/o adress for an specific pci slot
• Pam.d questions
• Finding my computer at home from the outside LG #65

Easy LG browsing 2 cent tip

This handy dandy function is courtasy of Cobratek on #Mandrake on Efnet, it is super kewl, since you can unpack all your LG issues (you do have all 65 don't you?) and instanty view any one.

Simply add this function to either ~/.bashrc or better yet /etc/bashrc so everyone on your system can read LG.

function lg () { lynx /home/bandido/docs/Linux.Gazette/$1/index.html ; }

Remember to change path to whatever you unpack your LG issues to, and do not use ~/ dirname of course if you put the function in /etc/bashrc

Personally I unpack all issues like this,


/home/bandido/doc/Linux.Gazette/1
/home/bandido/doc/Linux.Gazette/2
3 4 5
etc

Thus, I type lg 20 or lg 35 etc, to open 20 or 35 instanlty in lynx, and I am in prior dir when I exit. Nice and handy, never far away from LG Feel feel to drop by #Mandrake on Efnet too, unlike most linux channeols, newbies are very much welcome.

vim hot color swapping

Vim's syntax highlighting can be helpful at times at painful at other times. Add this to your .vimrc and you can turn colors on and off with the tap of a button.

  " map F8 to switch on and off syntax highlighting
  function Swapcolor()
    if exists("g:syntax_on")
      syntax off
      set nohlsearch
    else
      syntax on
      set hlsearch
    endif
  endfunction
  map <F8> :call Swapcolor()<CR>

linux version of dos commands

They start with letter "m." They look at a floppy disk as "a:" or "a:\" as Windoze does.
To copy one file to another, use "mcopy"
If you want to copy a file "myfile" from a: to your home directory, use this command:

mcopy a:\myfile /home

If you want to copy myfile from /home to a: use this command:

mcopy /home/myfile a

To check the contents of a file or directory, use mdir.
To check the contents of a:

mdir a:

Hope that helps a little bit,
stevew

Booting w/ CD-ROM

Hello,

How can I use CFDISK from my REDHAT CD-ROM as though it was from a hard drive linux installation?

If this is during the install process, I am pretty sure you could hit <ctrl><alt><f1-?> to switch to another terminal. Keep cycling through the keys until you find a free terminal. You should then be able to use cfdisk.

-- Daniel

dvi and Deskjet

Dear answer guy,

I would like to print a dvi file on an HP600 deskjet printer. Is it possible ? I've tried with the commands dvilj, dvilj2p, dvilj4 and dvil4l, but there are all for LaserJet printers. So I have some strange results.

Have you tried "dvihp"? It's supposed to convert DVIs to HP PCL (Printer Control Language.) Or, you could always just run "dvips" - it'll produce a PostScript file that you should be able to print without any problems.
-- Ben

how to find an i/o adress for an specific pci slot

i need to find out the slot adress for my pci network card , how can i easily track down this

my network card is in slot 1 and i need to find out the adress (0x0081 or ???)

Does it say in the boot messages? Run "dmesg | less" to see your boot messages again. If you don't find the right information, please send us back a copy of your boot messages (in particular, the portions beginning with "PCI: " and anything that looks like it may be related to the network card).

Each PCI slot corresponds to a fixed address. Perhaps looking in include/linux/pci.h or drivers/pci/pci.c in the kernel source would help.
-- Mike

Pam.d questions

Back for more of your knowledge

And we're still here dishing it out!

I have an authlog file & i keep seeing this info within it

Apr  3 11:31:58 echelon pam_limits[27640]: invalid line 'hard^Icore^I0'
Apr  3 11:31:58 echelon pam_limits[27640]: invalid line 'soft^Inproc^I100'
Apr  3 11:31:58 echelon pam_limits[27640]: invalid line 'hard^Inproc^I150'
Apr  3 11:31:58 echelon pam_limits[27640]: invalid line 'hard^Ifsize^I40000'

Pam was installed via an RPM & seems to be working fine within everything else.

I would just like to fix this area of it if possible

Check your /etc/security/limits.conf file. It seems PAM doesn't like it. Why? I don't know, but I checked my limits.conf file and my columns were separated by spaces, not tabs.

If you do a cat -v -t -e /etc/security/limits.conf, you'll see tabs as ^I and eon-oflines as $. -- Faber

Just to be nitpicky, cat -A is a combination of those options. -- Ben

cat -T is enough to see the dratted tabs as ^I but stray spaces at the end of the line still won't be obvious. -- Heather

Finding my computer at home from the outside LG #65

Hi there Linux Gazette Team!

I was browsing through LG today, and came across the article 'Finding my computer at home from the outside'. This is a topic that interests me, as I like to be able to access my home machine from school. Although technically accurate, I found that writing these scripts is an extremely cumbersome way to do the job. (Not to mention that passwordless logins (secure tunnel or no) are just plain bad form...). I'm not writing this email to complain (you guys do too much good work), but rather to inform!

If you're in a situation like me, and you either can't get (or can't afford) a static IP on broadband, there is a much simpler solution. https://www.dyndns.org. A free service (they DO accept donations), DynDNS allows you to register a hostname (within one of their domains...for now), and run a client to update with them each time your IP changes. After registering with DynDNS, you can download a little client utility (I prefer ipcheck.py), and have it run from your /etc/ppp/ip-up script (I'm on DSL, so my connection is still PPP)...which is run every time that your IP changes.

I've found the service to be most valuable.

Thanks
-Ben Walton

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Published in issue 66 of Linux Gazette May 2001

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