Storage B

I noticed on one of my systems running Debian Linux, some fonts where not displayed correctly (or not at all) when viewing pages using Flash.

This page led me to a solution for this problem. In my case, I only needed to install the gsfonts-x11 package. Now Flash appears to be working correctly.

Part II - Electric Boogaloo

In Part I, our intrepid hero used Knoppix’s Linux Live CD to determine that the Toshiba Satellite A45-S130 would run Linux without any problems with incompatible hardware. At the end of Part I, we were led to believe our hero would next repartition the hard drive and possibly install Mandrake Linux¹.

First of all, I was unable to get the free partition tools to work. I resorted to using Partition Magic 8.0 to do the job.² Secondly, I decided to just install Knoppix on the hard disk and it was easy enough to make it look more or less like a standard Debian³ installation. The end result is I have a fully functional laptop running Linux which I’ve been using since September 2004

1. I currently have Mandrake installed on a Pentium 233.
2. Honestly, I really didn’t spend to much time getting the free partitioning tools to work since I already had Partition Magic. I also wanted to preserve the Windows XP partition because I occasionally have to use Windows for work.
3. I have Debian installed on a 486 (try installing a recent MS OS on a 486!)

Part I - Will it even work?

I bought this Toshiba laptop back February because it supposedly works well with Linux. After 8 months of muddling along with Windows XP, I decided to get serious and install Linux. Rather than going through the trouble of repartitioning the hard disk and installing Linux only to find some obscure hardware incompatibility, I decided to try Knoppix’s Linux Live CD (basically a Linux distro that runs off a bootable CD).

Booting from the Knoppix CD is painless (hold ESC during boot, then press F1 to get into the BIOS setup to change the boot order). Knoppix boots successfully everything appears to work, including sound.

Getting connected to a wireless network

I recently ran in to a couple of problems building XEmacs 21.1.14 under Mandrake Linux 8.2. While running configure, I got the following:

*** PANIC *** The C compiler can no longer build working executables.
*** PANIC *** Please examine the tail of config.log for runtime errors.
*** PANIC *** The most likely reason for this problem is that configure
*** PANIC *** links with shared libraries, but those libraries cannot be
*** PANIC *** found at run time.
*** PANIC ***
*** PANIC *** On a Linux system, edit /etc/ld.so.conf and re-run ldconfig.
*** PANIC *** On other systems, try telling configure where to find the
*** PANIC *** shared libraries using the –site-runtime-libraries option
*** PANIC ***
*** PANIC *** Another way to shoot yourself in the foot is to specify
*** PANIC *** –with-FEATURE when FEATURE is not actually installed
*** PANIC *** on your system. Don’t do that.

After a little digging, it was found that the presence of WINE was the culprit. Apparently, configure got fooled into thinking it was running on a Windows machine. The solution was to rename libgdi32.so(in /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib) to something like libgdi32.tmp before running configure. After renaming libgdi32.so, configure ran fine and make seemed to work.

Unfortunately xemacs would die horrible death if run under X. The solution to this problem was to rerun configure with following option: ‘–ldflags=-z nocombreloc’ (and of course remaking the whole thing). Now everything works fine.