Xandros to Debian

[Calum]

well i heard xandros was based on Debian sarge, and after adding the sarge repositories and pinning the xandros packages (to avoid them being upgraded to non xandros packages) i found a lot of stuff wouldn't install or upgrade due to the dependency issues that the pinning wouldn't allow.

well i removed the pinning and went for a dist-upgrade, prepared for the worst, and had...

NO PROBLEMS! about 130 packages were upgraded to debian sarge versions and only the odd one or two remain xandros versions, then i installed kdm, which replaced the modified kdm that comes with xandros (package name has a suffix so the dist-upgrade doesn't touch it by itself) and installed some more esoteric things like 9wm and ratpoison and we're good to go! no problems yet!

a couple of minor problems though, all my runlevels seem to be multiuser X levels, and i want to correct this to more sensible behaviour, how? do i just change the /etc/inittab or is it more complicated than that.

also, know any apt repositories which have mplayer in them?

[Void Main]

Debian's startup initialization is different than Red Hat on one extreme and Slackware on the other extreme. There is actually a service script to start X. If I recall you want to make it so the service script doesn't start in like runlevel 4 and then when you want a text based boot you start into runlevel 4, otherwise start into runlevel 5. But you are right, I think it is set to start X in all run levels by default. I think that Xandros forum link I gave you in the other thread talked about it. I'll check into it more when I get home so I can verify the accuracy of the BS I am spewing. :)

EDIT: Yes, this link doesn't answer your question?

[Calum]

it looks like it! thanks for that voidmain, now the hard ones...

a bit more irritating now, first of all mozilla mail now says this whenever i try to send mail to anybody at anywhere:



secondly, why can i not mount a floppy? i know the floppy is alright since i just ran fdformat on it with no errors at all:

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bash-2.05b$ mount /mnt/floppy/
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/fd0,
       or too many mounted file systems
bash-2.05b$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab -- static file system information
# auto generation: on
# generated by: /sbin/etcdev2fstab
#
# NOTE: to make this file readable, it has been formatted for 132 columns
#
#<device>                              <mountpoint>      <fstype>  <options>                                       <dbg> <pass>
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part6  / ext3      defaults        0     0
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1  /mnt/winsux  vfat  rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,nouser,async,umask=0,showexec=no 0  0
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part8  /mnt/winhome  vfat  rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,nouser,async,umask=0,showexec=no 0  0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0  /mnt/cdrom    iso9660   ro,nosuid,nodev,exec,users,noauto,async,unhide,umask=0   0     0
/dev/fd0  /mnt/floppy          vfat      rw,nosuid,nodev,exec,users,noauto,async,umask=0        0     0
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part7  /mnt/home         reiserfs  rw        0     0
proc  /proc             proc      rw                                     0     0
usbdevfs       /proc/bus/usb     usbdevfs  rw,devmode=0666           0     0
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5  none              swap      sw              0     0
/dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /mnt/zip      auto      rw,suid,nodev,exec,users,noauto,async      0     0



i don't know if this is a new problem either, and i haven't tried to mount a CD or a floppy since i installed xandros, so as i say i don't know if this is a problem from the upgrade or from xandros. any ideas? i suspect something fairly simple...

[Void Main]

1) It would be pretty hard to trouble-shoot without knowing what your mail settings were (SMTP server, etc). An aside note, when sending email to my linuxmail.org email address via sendmail directly from one of my machines behind my cable connection linuxmail.org rejects my messages too because it knows my IP address is in a known cable modem range. They refuse email directly from cable modem addresses (no real ISP mail server would be behind a cable modem). The reason they do this is because of all the virus infected M$ machines that send out SPAM. So if you are trying to send mail via sendmail directly from your server and you are on a cable connection then this may be your problem. You should be getting a rejection message though which would clearly state this. If this is your problem and you need to get mail to linuxmail.org you will have to send it through an SMTP server that is not on a cable modem IP range.

2) fdformat only low level formats a floppy. It doesn't actually put a file system on the floppy which means you can not mount it or write data to it until you put a file system on it. If you want to format it FAT then use the "mformat" command. If you want to format one of the Linux formats use "mkfs".

[Calum]

ok,

1) i had mistyped my incoming server name, so it was my error, but i don't think that would affect sending
2) i didn't know that, thanks

well i have overwritten my debian upgrade with another default xandros, because these odd things were a bit confusing, still xandros uses this odd method of mounting didks, where autofs is used, and they all get mounted under /disks but it's awkward because it seems it often continuously polls disk drives after you try to access them, whether there are disks in or not. so i have to find out how to sort out autofs or else how to mount the disks properly under /mnt both of which should be easy enough after a bit of reading, but i just don't have the time right now.

do you reckon if i want to mount them normally i just need to rewrite the fstab file and make the relevant disks under /mnt ? also, in the new fstab should i use the protracted devfs (or whatever they are called) device names or the more simple ones, which appear to work also?

[Calum]

back again! well, here's a new wrinkle. i have still got the debian-based-on-xandros setup, a lot of things are now from the sarge branch while some stuff remains from xandros.com, but now i have no mozilla and don't know how to fix it.

i did find a webpage telling me not to muck around with kde or mozilla in a xandros based system but this was after the fact. now i have tried taking everything out of my sources.list file except the xandros.com lines, and i have tried leaving all the lines uncommented and here's what i get both times (remembering to do an apt-get update after each edit):

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claudia:~# apt-get install mozilla
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming.

Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that the package is simply not installable and a bug report against that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  mozilla: Depends: mozilla-browser (= 2:1.0.0-0.woody.1) but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: mozilla-mailnews (= 2:1.0.0-0.woody.1) but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: mozilla-psm (= 2:1.0.0-0.woody.1) but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages


oh! nearly forgot:

#Here's my /etc/apt/sources.list for your perusal...
deb http://xnv2.xandros.com/2.0/pkg xandros2.0-xn main contrib non-free
deb http://xnv2.xandros.com/2.0/pkg unsupported2.0-xn main contrib non-free

#Sarge
deb http://ftp.caliu.info/debian-non-US sarge/non-US main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.caliu.info/debian-non-US sarge/non-US main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.caliu.info/debian/ sarge main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.caliu.info/debian/ sarge main non-free contrib
deb http://security.debian.org/ sarge/updates main contrib non-free

# sarge (i.e., testing)
deb http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian sarge main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian-non-US sarge/non-US main contrib non-free

#Stable
deb http://ftp.bononia.it/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.bononia.it/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.bononia.it/debian-non-US/ stable/non-US main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.bononia.it/debian-non-US/ stable/non-US main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
#
# mplayer-update site
deb http://okki666.nerim.net/debian ./

i think this is something to do with stuff that is installed from when i had tons of lines in my sources.list file, but which now needs weeding out, but for the life of me i am very confused about how to sensibly tackle it. i do have other browsers installed and actually i don't need mozilla at all, it is just annoying to know this jagged hole exists in my configuration and i can'tpatch it up!

also, how do i fix the thing where my time is an hour out now that we're into british summer time, anybody?

thanks in advance, and none of this is life threatening so don't lose any sleep over it.

edit: gee whiz! i can change the time thing from kcontrol! never thought to use it for that. still i am curious to how kcontrol does it since ideally i'd want to know how to perform this trivial task on a system without kde installed.

[Void Main]

Changing the time is easy on all Linux systems, however, if you actually want to change the time zone that could be distro specific. You can use the "date" command to change the system time and use the "hwclock" command to write the system time to the hardware clock once you have it where you want it (hwclock is usually in /sbin). There could be several files associated with a timezone change. For instance in Red Hat you would need to copy an appropriate time zone file to /etc/localtime. And you would want to update the /etc/sysconfig/clock. I'm not sure if there is anything else off the top of my head.

[Calum]

right! now i see what you mean. less confused now, thanks.