[ale] Several questions

[Mike Kachline]

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>1. My printer
>	At one time, I printed the Firewall HOWTO out of TkDesk for my
>dad. From then on, linux has been obsessed with printing it again. As
>soon as it finished the first time, it started again. Whenever I turn on
>the printer in linux, it tries to finish printing it. It won't stop even
>after reboot and I would like to be able to print other things in linux.
>Any tips?
<snip>
	Hmm. Sounds like your lp queue (lpq) is stuffed with lots of the same
print job. Try looking to see what is in your printer queue with the
"lpq" command. My hunch is that there may be several instances of the same job
in the queue. To delete them, use "lprm".



>
>2. Linux file system
>	To my great delight, I received a "secret santa" gift of a 4.3G
>HD. Because so much of the stuff I have is Windows specific, I plan to
>run it dual boot Win95 and Linux. How much space do I need to give for
>linux? How should I set up the partitions? (How many partitions for
>linux?) Which directories are supposed to go on their own partition, and
>how do I set it up to know where they are? I plan to give linux around
>2G, is that too much? Note that I am setting up a 'new' system for this
>drive. (New refers to 486DX4 100. ;)  )
<snip>
	My personal suggestion would be to create four primary partions, then
put them as follows:

	/dev/hdx1 1 - 1.2 gigs 	( Linux  /  )
	/dev/hdx2 300MB+ (Linux /home )
	/dev/hdx3 16Mb - 64Mb  (Linux Swap)
	/dev/hdx4 Rest of drive (Win9x)

	I like this setup because, if I ever want to totally blow away my Linux
installation and get a newer, later and greater version, all of the stuff from
my user account(s) are preserved. I like to create a partition for /usr/local,
but, would't really deem it very nessacery unless you like hacking.
	One other nice feature of this setup is that you can put LILO in the
"superblock" of your linux root partition, thus avoiding any potential problems
with virus scanners "accidently" deleting LILO from the boot sector, and of
ensuring that your LILO partition will be found on machines with LBA 
problems.






 >
>3. Multiple Hard drives
>	Is there any way, with multiple hard drives, for linux to think
>they are one? For example, be able to split a file across both drives,
>yet it run as if it were on one. On the computer I am on now( the 4.3G HD
<snip>
	This is known as striping. I'm pretty sure that 2.1.x kernels support
striping, but hopefully someone else on the list knows how to implement it.


>4. Dissappearing files
>	I have downloaded several files, and save them to D:\ in Windows.
>When in linux, I access them from /DOS/ and use the mv filename
>~/filename command. When I then issue a cd ~, the files are gone. They no
>longer exist anywhere. Yet, when I use cp filename ~/filename, and then
>delete the original, it works fine. Why does it do this, and can it be
>fixed?
	Hmm. Got me there. That's wierd.

>
>5. Strange colors in X games
>	In some X windows games that I have had, when I would move the
>mouse off of the window, strange colors result. Others (less simple
>games) run with no problem. Coincidentally, the games I have run in X
>also have SVGALIB versions, which I run because of the problem in X. Any
>way to fix this?
<snip>
	X isn't as nice as Win9x in the task of colormap management. Thus, many
games which know that they will need colors will create what is known as their
own "private colormap" when they start up. Most work on the principle that, so
long that the game has the focus, it will set the current color map to make the
game look nice, ignoring the needs of the other running applications (such as
your window manager). Thus, as far as I know, this behavior is actually normal.


>
>6. Dissappearing .gz 
>	When I download programs for linux and successfully move them to
>an installation area, I gzip -d them. Where did the .gz file go when I
>did this? Also, where am I supposed to unzip these programs at? From what
>I have read, there is a specific place I am supposed to install programs,
>where is it?
<snip>
	"gzip -d" makes gzip behave like gunzip. Thus, gzip takes the zipped up
file, then turns it into an uncompressed file. To let you know that it actually
uncompressed the file, gzip saves the new file without the .gz name extension.


									- Mike
============================================================================
Michael Kachline CS, Georgia Institute of Technlology
kachline at brightstar.gt.ed.net
http://brightstar.gt.ed.net/kachline
============================================================================

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