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The Mailbag From The Readers of Linux Gazette

• BiDi Problems in WINE + SMARTDRAW
• Squid and FTP
• create new lilo boot loader - on 2nd drive

BiDi Problems in WINE + SMARTDRAW

#sorry about my english... i'ved learned that by myself.. so ..
# U can make some modifications < of course.. it's gpl..> in my english
mistakes

So I did, just a little, though usually we leave questions alone so people have a sense of how the querent meant things -- Heather

Hiya guys..

I have a problem ( d' aah)

I've tried to use SmartDraw under wine.. and then.. after I configure everything.. It works! At least, I think that, when I see SmarrtDraw starting.. showing the initial WELCOME.. etc.. but.. when he tries to show me the initial screen < to chose the objects of my diagram> BUMMER! My wine DIES.

my log is so big.. and every thing happens about BiDi...

#] warn:font:GetCharacterPlacementW The BiDi algorythm doesn't conform
to Windows'

And then.. BiDi throws a lot of junk < i suppose> in my memory causing some HEAPS Faults:.

#] warn:heap:HEAP_IsRealArena Heap 0x40db0000: block 0x408acf is not
inside heap

there's not an upgrade for BiDi available.. and.. since November 22.. BiDi has been going crazy... with some programs that request some kind of.. font.. i don't know...

The HEAP Faults problem.. I solved myself making a bigger "X:/temp" and includding a new path for junk.. but.. WINE couldn't pass through BiDi, when it get a crash.. cause the BiDi NEVER stops to send some.. THING. < i don't know what either.> to the memory.. that fills up.. whatever is your /temp size! < mine is 2 G!>

I just don't know what to do! I'm really really lost.. and.. I need to make wine work... it's not for the program itself.. it's for the HONOR! AHUuhauahh

DO you guys know ANYTHING about that Suddenly Crashing?!? Or.. incompatibility ? Or whatever you call it... ...

Tnkx so much for reading my crappy email...

PS:. .. HEEEEEELP!

Daniel Carneiro do Nascimento

Squid and FTP

Hi there,

I use squid as a proxy server (default configuration) and it seems that i can't connect to ftp sites through it. Do I have to do anything?

Nickos, Greece

It appears that this is an FAQ in the land of Squid, number 12.17 -- "Can I make my regular FTP clients use a Squid cache?"

Nope, its not possible. Squid only accepts HTTP requests. It speaks FTP on the server-side, but not on the client-side.

The very cool wget will download FTP URLs via Squid (and probably any other proxy cache).

However, it would be fun to have an article about somebody using Squid and/or other site caching software in powerful ways to make their site's view of the web more fun. There are a bunch of add-ons at Freshmeat for it, so I'm sure someone out there has a great example for us to follow. Don't forget to read our author submission guidelines. -- Heather

create new lilo boot loader - on 2nd drive

Hi people, I have a problem......

I'm actually trying to mirror the hard disks using RAID 1 in Red Hat 9.It can work perfectly but the bug is that i can only boot up the first hard disk, i suppose lilo is stored as th MBR in it. The second hard disk during booting up, shows LI and i boot it using a bootup diskette instead. I'm wondering how to implement lilo in the second HDD in such a way that it auto boots up just like the 1st HDD.Is it possible?

Is it true that only 1 MBR could be used will it work on 2 MBR in 2 respective hard disks?

I visited the Boot+Raid+Root+ Lilo How to documentation: & i tried this method to boot up second HDD..but there's error

it is known as a raid LILO config file pair that I implemented:

See attached geraldine.lilo.conf.hda.txt

I created this 2 lilo configuration file but not too sure whether is eing read anot because i still have a current default lilo file /etc/lilo.conf

See attached geraldine.default.etc-lilo.conf.txt

Bacially that's about all...I hope your gang can resolve my roblem.Sorry if i bored you to sleep with such a long email. Hope to hear from ya soon...

Cheers, Geraldine

• Re: Liunx Gazette in Palm Format
• Article Ideas - Semaphores

Re: Liunx Gazette in Palm Format

On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 12:36:02PM -0700, Heather wrote:

[Ben] You can use "bibelot" (available on Freshmeat, IIRC); it's a Perl script that converts plaintext into Palm's PDB format. I have a little script that I use for it:

Does the raw PDB format have a size limit? Our issues can get pretty big sometimes... -- Heather

[Ben] "The Complete Shakespeare" was over 5MB. No trouble at all, except for uploading it ("jpilot" wouldn't do it; neither would the Wind0ws prog on my brother's machine. Kudos to "coldsync".)

Plucker is an open source palm document reader and in my humble opinion THE BEST. There are some really good Linux GUI document converters available for it.

I checked out site-scooper but unfortunately they are very out of date, I'll have to look at installing the scripts on my own box.

The issue I have when converting the site manually is that as the site refences links external to the main document I get duplicate copies of the articles in one document hence an extremely large file (Issue 91 is 1.98MB !!)

Anyway thanks very much for your help, I was quite surprised to get a
response for such a trivial question --- thanks again

James

Glad we could help, though I'm disappointed to hear sitescooper isn't keeping up to date. -- Heather

Article Ideas - Semaphores

I have done some searching on the internet for semaphores and have found very little info, and no tutorials. I think that you could use this as a topic to suppliment your article on Message Queues in Issue-89 ( "Exploring Message Queues, Part I" , Raghu J Menon).

Suggested Sections

1 SystemV Semaphores (semget, semop semctl)

2 POSIX 1003.1b Semaphores (sem_init, sem_wait, sem_trywait, sem_post, sem_get_value, sem_destroy)

I have heard mention of something called pthread semaphores, but I am unsure as to what these are, or how to use them.

BTW, SystemV semaphores use key_id (int) which must be unique. ftok() can be used to hash a key from a filepath and a project id, but there must be other ways to generate keys...

It would be really nice to see examples of this in action, as that is one thing that I could not find (exclusively for Linux that is).

Great Magazine!

Thanks,

Richard Willis, B.Eng (EIT)

• The things we have to go through to get our articles

The things we have to go through to get our articles

Ooh, ooh. . . . I used to ... at a former job, and hereby volunteer to write an article on setting up an equivalent. I may need some shouting and/or threats of physical violence to overcome my procrastination though.

Black helicopter request has been filed. It'll be right over as soon as our local operative-in-dark-glasses can fix the autopilot. Of course, if you finish the article before liftoff, do let us know, and we'll send over one of Wooner's beautiful dame clients to pick up the package...

Will do. Um... over and out (?)

Heh. One beautiful dame, coming up next article. Watch for long legs, slinky dresses, and languorous questions about whistling ability. -- Ben

And if you're the sort of person who can fry a good article up sometime this summer -- to make Linux a little more fun for folks who get dizzy when they need to know what sorts of barbecue briquettes are used for firewalls around here - do let us know. We're planning our editorial schedule to layout how August and September will be released, and having some articles in ahead of time would be really, really handy. Now I can't guarantee a personal pick-up by ultra modern black helicopter with an absolutely gorgeous - shall we say bombshell? - dame flying it, but we can ask! -- Heather