86 new of 480 responses total.
Heh. Even if you're dead ...
Re resp:391: I have the same problem, but I drape a folded blanket over the end of the bed to keep my feet warm. I find caffiene aggravates the poor circulation so you may want to avoid it close to bedtime, even if it doesn't keep you awake.
Sissies.
I have never used caffeine. I will try being barefooted next time it goes over 70. Today we got up at 7 am. I put batteries in a rooster alarm clock and when it went off I thought at first it was me wheezing really loudly. We got there at quarter to 8 and saw the nurse practitioner at 8:15 and then waited until only 9:30 for the 9 am infusion. Lost of empty seats but not many nurses yet. They let us be #1 so as to cough on other people in only one direction. The first two people next to me did not blast the TV so we played some back oboe concertoes. Three of the nurses stopped by to appreciate them. My nurse said she had been to a meeting where she and some others urged that they require headphones for people listening TV, for the benefit of both other patients and staff. 10 hours of screaming and banging is hard on my nerves. My first neighbor left as I was getting my IV. My second one had breast cancer and spoke Greek. This was her first therapy after surgery and she would also have radiation. She had diabetes. The nurse spent about an hour explaining what was happening and what to do at home. The third had multiply myeloma and had to have infusions every month, forever, recently upped to every two weeks,. Only 2 hours at a time. And then four steroid pill days, four off, four on, four off. She has trouble walking as a result. She said when someone in the room happens to have their last therapy everyone cheers. Nobody will be cheering for her. It is apparently up to the doctor to decide whether I get two more sessions if every sign of the tumor is gone. Probably I will get them since it shows I am responding, and we can go after any invisible ones. If there is no sign of change maybe I won't get two more sessions, but perhaps a PET scan will reveal surviving tumor cells. I won't know much until the 29th. With luck a doctor will come in day after Christmas to read the results of my Dec 24 scan. Jim is supposed to get a flu shot (not oral live vaccine) after he gets over his current infection of 3 weeks duration so that I don't get flu from him. He boosted his immunity by sampling all the cupcakes. I ate tylenol, benadryl, kytril and some other pill in applesauce. My blood pressure today started at 98 over 52 and went down to 92 at one point. The benadryl does that. My pulse gradually drifted down from 100 (when I walked in) to 82 (after sitting two hours). We wound down by taking a few photos and checking out C++ courses at WCC with Glenda, who runs the lab there. We will go back tomorrow to their annual holiday buffet banquet, cooked and served by students and with lots of vegetables.
Today we signed Jim up at WCC for a C++ programming course and got him a half-price textbook (used) at half.com. I eventually figured out how to unsubscribe him from all the junk mail that they warned us about, and we did not fill out the survey to get $10 off the next book he buys within 3 months because that also signs you up for something else that costs $9/month if you forget to unsubscribe after the first month - half price meals at Pizza Hut, etc. He got the professor's signature to override the prerequisite, which was some type of high school algebra. He mentioned he had already taken a course in programming assembly language. The banquet included mushroom soup, pineapple lime soup, cactus leaf and squid salad, fried plantains, green beans, artichoke-cauliflower-celery, squash, potato croquettes, two types of noodles, some meats, and cheesecake. My sense of taste comes back at the end of each cycle and lasts a few days into the next one, also the prednisone has restored my appetite which the couch took away, so I disregarded the fact that I should not be eating salt. It helped me to get down three glasses of water (needed to flush out the chemicals). Jim does not eat cheesecake (milk and eggs) unless it gets close enough. The other side of the room was close enough. We sat at a table with one of the cooks, who is 19 and really enthusiastic about opening his own restaurant some day. The culinary arts program first teaches the students how to clear tables, then how to serve soups and entrees wearing white jackets and tall white hats, then how to cook, and only then how to wait tables. He also took a course in 'drinks' in which they went on winery tours but could not sample the wines. He is 19. They are allowed to sample wines in class for educational purposes. The waiters need to be able to recommend wines to go with different dead animal dishes. He is also working in a local restaurant where he says everyone takes turns doing everything. That way the cooks don't make too many dishes dirty since they have been dishwashers. Also at our table was an art professor who donated the WCC sculpture. On arrival home a friend called to let us know she had dropped off a small apple pie so we had that for supper (with two more cups of liquid for me). WCC has buffets every Wed and Thurs (starting again in Feb.) but fewer courses and about half the price. Same menu both days. And sit-down meals Mon and Wed. Today we had two tablecloths, cloth napkins, fancy water glasses, bread and butter plates, and a jazz band. This was the international banquet, which included Europe and Mexico. Jim still has a bad cold. I wish I could lend him some neutrophils as my count was more than double last time. Today's exercise was walking around three buildings at WCC and climbing some tall stairs a few times. The place is really overheated.
It depends on where you go. The classroom you saw me in yesterday is usually very cold. The one I spent today in was the hottest on campus, until they finally figured out what was causing the air conditioner to not work, now it is almost as cold as yesterday's.
The thermostat in the hallway outside the computer lab was set at 74, which is pretty warm for winter. The computer lab felt even hotter. U of M Cancer Center is 70. You need air conditioning in computer classrooms in winter? We used to air condition the gym in winter for folk dance classes because if you turned the heat below maybe 75 the air conditioning automatically came on. In the old gym we only had to open the window - no window in the new gym. I got about 5 hours sleep after 3 am. This was the two days I had to drink a lot and it comes back out when the prednisone wears off in the evening. I should still drink a lot and eat lots of fiber while taking prednisone. My other side effects have not escalated again yet. Hands still have sensation, leg muscles still work pretty much okay. Probably by tonight my hands will be numb again. Laryngitis hit yesterday morning, which made it even harder to talk to people over the loud jazz band. My tongue and throat are not feeling raw yet or my hands shaky. Jim has not been feeling well enough to drag me out walking recently, but of course that did not stop him from dragging us all over WCC for two days. Everyone keeps telling me to get a flu shot except my doctors who tell me specifically not to because I am likely to get flu from it with a weakened immune system. One friend called and said Washtenaw and Oakland counties are out of the nasal spray, which Jim is not supposed to get either because it is live vaccine. Is the dead vaccine (the injection) free somewhere?
If you put enough computers in a room it heats up pretty good. My office is in the server room at work and it hovers around 80 degrees in there, year 'round. I've been trying to get them to put a separate A/C system in here but they keep putting it off because they don't want to spend the money.
Depends on how they tend to cool the room. The server room where I work is freezing, because they have the temperature way down to off- set the heat from the computers.
I used to have this huge old compaq file server running in my apartment. When I finally managed to offload all its functions onto other computers and turn it off, the average temperature in that room dropped at least 5 degrees. Not to mention the noise level.
Can WCC take the heat from the computer labs and move it to where it is wanted? For a start, they could turn the hallway thermostat down to 70 and run a fan in the doorway of the lab.
There isn't much that can be done. The power plant is old and outdated. It was going to be replaced with a modern, more efficient one when the state budget cuts hit. That caused a cutback in a lot of planned renovations to avoid huge tuition increases. We deal with it. We have learned to dress in layers in the winter and to carry a sweater or long sleeved shirt in the summer. We run fans when necessary, but they don't help much and add to the electricity bill. Most people don't complain about the heat until it gets closer to 80, and complain when it goes much below 72. I have called about a room being too cold when the thermostat read 75 because most of the workstations in it were directly under a vent. So we just cope.
The timing was just right on postponing chemotherapy. Wed chemo, Thursday pharyngitis and less coughing, Friday stuffy nose, today sneezing, which means I am finally fighting off that cold before my immunity is gone tomorrow. The side effects come back within a couple of days of therapy - hands are a bit shaky again (but still not numb), laryngitis hit the morning after. Today I managed to sleep from 1:30 to 6:30 and another 2 hours in the morning and feel the best in a couple of weeks. I took a bath yesterday since the water was already hot from Jim soaking in it. His cold is still worse than mine and he is also eating lots of grapefruits. Grapefruits don't mix well with baths - the oil gets in the water and burns. I noticed in the bath that all the skin had finished peeling off my soles, that I have very small red speckles all over my front torso where small blood vessels are not healing, and that my upper thighs are now actually larger than they were and I can no longer reach around them with thumb and middle finger -there is a 1" gap. Last night I was able to sleep without a pillow between my knees as cushioning, and I have gained back enough muscles and/or fat around my shoulders that I also don't need a pillow under my upper arm to sleep. It was rather a nuisance having to rearrange all this whenever I wanted to turn over, or when I woke up every hour to throw off the blankets due to hot flashes (which are also much better). Sleep is nice. I have to get back to exercising but perhaps had better wait until I stop sneezing since it is unlikely to get warmer soon. We are finally going through the last 20 or so sets of small headphones that we took home four years ago to fix from Kiwanis. Made four pairs into one good one since they broke in different places - plastic things that the actual speakers fit into tend to break easily, the cords break in multiple places and cannot always to diagnosed to solder them, and sometimes the speakers themselves go bad. Jim has been making new foam pads, too. We have one pair with purple foam, and one with green foam. Jep stopped by yesterday and we confirmed that his vacuum cleaner did indeed need a new roller because it was made of plastic and the race for the ball bearings had worn out from friction. It was nice to see him. He said he had already had our cough/cold. I am now going to avoid people for about five days until my immune system comes back. Only today and tomorrow and I am done with prednisone for a while, and only two more months of therapy. It was nice of the doctor not to let me know at first that it was likely to be 8 sessions total. My hair is coming out faster again. My leg muscles are still not weaker. I have an occasional shooting pain in my left hand where the IV was but otherwise am feeling pretty good for this time of cycle. My sense of taste is getting worse again but the prednisone at least makes me hungry. I still have a chance of hitting 110 by Jan 1, but not a high chance since I lost two pounds instead of gaining last cycle. I will aim instead at 115 pounds by the end of therapy in mid February. More than I have weighed for 4 years.
I got four hours sleep (prednisone keeps me up late) before waking at 5 with a long hot flash and sweating. I don't know why it let up for a few days - either the cold was keeping me cooler, or the chemotherapy has knocked out whatever estrogen-producing cells were starting to recover. I am hoping for the latter, because it implies that I will recover again shortly after about Feb. 20. My bone marrow is 'depressed' again. I am blowing my nose a lot and getting a bit of blood on the ripped up old sheet that I am using instead of good handkerchiefs. It is odd to be off the usual weekly schedule, since I expect my bone marrow to be worst from Friday to Monday and today it started on Sunday instead. By next Friday I should be back to normal blood counts again. Luckily there is only one more day of prednisone so not too much overlap with the hot flashes and I hope to get some sleep Monday night (the garbage trucks will wake me Monday morning). My hands and leg muscles are still not numb. It is nice the side effects are somewhat spread out. Jim spent two hours on the phone talking with his sister in Warren. We are probably not going to have Christmas dinner with his family there since I may be continuing infusions the 29th. I don't want to risk catching any illnesses first. It would have been cheaper to drive to Detroit and back than talk two hours on the phone, but she likes talking on the phone anyway. And it is warmer than driving 3 hours in late December. The small nephew with hemophilia has not had any problems with it yet, or needed treatments yet. When babies get bigger they start to injure themselves. It is nice not to be up half the night coughing (and the other half of the night with hot flashes and prednisone side effects). I am too hungry to fall back asleep because prednisone makes me hungry. My mother (with a brain tumor that you cannot treat with chemotherapy because of the blood-brain barrier) was given prednisone indefinitely and at the nursing home would eat double meals. I wish my taste buds would keep working during the hungry period. Lima beans taste fairly normal. Rice/bread/noodles do not. Tangerines tasted better three days ago. I will try a warmed up glass of milk. The pharyngitis makes me cough if I drink cold things. How long does this cough/cold last? It is two weeks now and I still feel contagious.
Jim still feels more awful than I do but he went out to help his next door neighbor finish shoveling off Jim's walk. The neighbor is a nurse and said flu shots may be rationed to babies and the elderly and we might need a prescription for Jim since he was told to get one to protect me because I should not get vaccinated until I finish chemotherapy since I could get the flu from even a weakened vaccine. I hope my neighbors are shoveling my walk where we are supposed to be building a house. Usually whoever gets there first does both walks. It will be more difficult for us to reciprocate this year. But they do seem to think they owe Jim something for the plumbing repairs besides a watermelon. Jim is fixing headphone radios while waiting for the water to get hotter for his daily boiling bath. I am learning to make slackware packages. We got dosemu to save files to D: (/home/user/).
yay slack, and yay dosemu.
Yay linux but I just failed to compile lynx. Echo: command not found ??? I think I have to manually edit makefile before I can do make. configure seemed to work except for not finding a directory that I know is there. The author of a small free linux wordprocessor is letting basiclinux (or me, anyway) test his latest beta version. To read online documentation from the program do I just dial the ISP before accessing the 'help' menu item? He added four new mysterious features that are not on the menu, just on the toolbar, with cryptic icons for them. There is also an arrow that is chasing its own tail, which is different from the back arrow which lets you write from right to left.
(In your error message: was the capital "E" in "Echo" in the original message? There's probably not a command "Echo" - it's "echo".)
When I typed make all I got: /bin/sh -c' .cfg -defs.sh make: echo: Command not found [upper case C in command, lower case e in echo] make *** [help-files.sed] Error 127 I think I need to edit makefile to tell it where to find my source code and where to put the output files.
Makefile does not need to be edited except for changing shell from sh to bash. I have been given instructions how to test by typing 'type echo' and then invoking /bin/sh/ and doing it again. What is this all about? What is sh, a simpler shell than bash? We have bash, which does echo. Today I don't need to take any more prednisone which is nice for both of us since I did not need to wake Jim up to mash pills for me. I woke up at 4 (after 3 hours sleep) with hot flashes back full blast, digestive problems (due to the chemicals acting like a broad spectrum antibiotic) and a runny nose (probably normal with this cold, but I am in my second of four days of little immunity). It is all uphill this cycle starting tomorrow when I can get a full night's sleep. This morning I fell back asleep before the 7:30 garbage truck and actually slept through the next three for two hours to get a grand total of about 5 hours sleep. Linux seems to work okay on 5 hours. Hands are getting numb again gradually. Laryngitis is at its worst now. Legs are not yet wobbly/numb for a day or two. I emailed our doctor friend asking his opinion on whether JIm's five lab tests were 'routine annual exam' type tests so that I can have this info when I call the insurance company to ask what happened to my written appeal. This would be a good year to cash in a savings bond to pay for the rest of this year's expenses and the $5000 for the 8th chemotherapy in January and the first couple of CT scans next year and our property taxes in June, since I doubt I will be paying any income tax this year with no work earnings and high medical expenses. I am lucky I don't need to work during chemotherapy. This week I have been receiving lots of mail. Frequent little emails from a Macedonian friend whose boyfriend was recently diagnosed with stomach cancer, more from the older daughter of another Macedonian friend whose mother died of it, snail mail from someone who is about to go to Florida to care for her daughter who is being treated for it, email from a high school friend whose father in law is in the hospital with leukemia and her father is also in the hospital after his second stroke and now they put in a pacemaker. I am very happy not to have stomach cancer. So what if things taste funny. Or leukemia that needs to be treated forever. A friend in Trieste writes that her sister finished chemotherapy and surgery for stomach cancer in July and was able to go on summer vacation. The friend was taking care of her while working full time and was exhausted and taking sleeping pills but is better now. Jim is lucky he is not working full time and I hope he will get over his cold soon. It is discouraging to make nice meals for someone without a good sense of taste.
I changed SHELL = /bin/sh to /bin/bash in the configuration script, as instructed, and it compiled for about 15 minutes of making .c files and produced 1M of lynx that works!!!!!!! It sure helped to have this supervised by a world expert in compiling lynx for DOS and other systems. All I need to do now is install the executable, config file, manual and doc pages with make install and then create a lynx package for basiclinux. The next three garbage trucks after 7:30 did not wake me because they did not come by until after 9:30. My hands are shaky again. Jim is playing with a slide scanner. At 1200x800 dpi it scanned a slide to 340Mb, which I think is too big for our computer that has a 1G drive. I suppose he could make a CD from each slide but why bother?
Today's mail brought a letter from the insurance company for Jim. This is an adjustment of a previously processed claim, they say. They agreed to pay 80% of the $138, or $110.66, leaving $27.66 for us to pay. Hooray! We have to check my mail at my apt to see if they will also pay for my mattress pad that Medicare would have paid for. Just got both an emailed and a snail mailed photo of Jim's niece's really cute kid dressed in a Santa hat. He can sit up by himself. He does special exercise for kids with Down syndrome because they have joint and muscle problems. I am not the only one working hard to get better. Jim is thinking of something yummy to do with last year's frozen zucchini and I think I may have regained two pounds unless it is still fluid retention. The 340MB slide was scanned at 400%, which increased it from 5MB.
My immune system ought to start coming back tonight or tomorrow. I am coughing and have runny eyes again. My hands are numb all over. But I managed to sleep, on and off, a large part (3/4?) of the time between 11 pm and 8 am. My hair is coming out faster. Jim says he is interested in knitting but I already have enough wool caps. Today we hope to make me the start of a linux/DOS computer. I discovered that I cannot put in a sound card to play with in that computer unless I give up the ISA modem or the Hercules Graphics Card because it has only two ISA slots. A previous computer would not work at all with HGC in any of its three ISA slots. What do people put into FIVE pci slots? Winmodem, windows-only sound, network card, and what else?
Hmm...the PCI slots in my desktop computer contain a video card (which is also a TV tuner and video capture card), a sound card, a DVD hardware decoder card, and a network card. If I threw in a modem I'd have five slots full. Of course if I bought a motherboard now it would probably come with video, sound, and a network interface on-board, so I wouldn't need to use slots for those unless I wanted something better than what was built in.
FireWire cards, IrDA cards, IRMAboard 3270 terminal emulation boards; someone somewhere has probably come up with a board with PC Card slots; the Amiga 1200 desktop computer had a PC Card slot built in; someone developed an external SCSI + NIC card for it.
Wow, there are PCI 3270 terminal emulators? The last one I saw was 8-bit ISA, and was in an IBM XT. Boards with PC Card slots not only exist, many PCI wireless network cards are actually PC Card-to-PCI bridge cards that you slide a PC Card wireless adapter into. Some of these are more full-featured than others. The one that's sold for Orinoco cards is actually a full-fledged PC Card bridge that you can plug any PC Card device into.
I don't know that there are specifically PCI 3270 cards, no.
We don't have any TV or DVD cards, or any need for network cards, and as far as I know all the pci modems and sound cards only work with Windows. I don't really need sound for anything, I guess. The video card in there is AGP. So I have five empty pci slots. Jim went off to pick up some books on C++ despite feeling like his cold will never end. He dressed in a goretex raincoat instead of a warm jacket so he would not get overheated biking. He can get a flu shot even if he has a cold, as long as he has no fever, if he gets to the County Health Dept. in Ypsi before they run out, because as a pair we count as 'high risk'. I am not supposed to catch flu from him and I can't get the shot myself. Maybe we will take the car to Ypsi Thursday if he feels better since my immune system is due to come back by then. There is also a holiday party at the Library for the Blind and Physically Disabled, where he gets his books on tape, halfway to Ypsi, which would be our big event of the week. I am getting a bit tired of having to avoid people. My friend in Macedonia writes that her boyfriend has been to Greece and Serbia for medical reasons. He got his stomach cancer diagnosed in Bulgaria. Macedonia does not have a lot of medical equipment. He has a doctor friend in Toronto where I think he might get treated. He has to continue working until spring first. I sure have it easy. So what if my ankles and wrists are numb today and my tongue feels sandpapered again. The reason for the narrow stripes in the darker areas of scanned photos is scanner noise. Jim thinks he has a way to fix this by setting the black and white somehow. The library book also explains how to use a black and white scanner to scan color by scanning three times with colored filters and then combining the outputs. The noise is amplified when the signal is weak (which it is in the darker areas). At least we won't run out of toys. Are the latest computers now coming with TV tuners and DVD players built in? I thought PCI cards (PCMCIA?) were only for laptops.
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I meant are PC-cards the same as PCMCIA. Typo. Yesterday we hooked up some low technology to our high technology in the form of a boombox with 'line in' plugged into the sound output of our Windows computer and tried to listen to Realaudio. I think it sounded better a couple of years ago with a slower modem. The sound keeps cutting out now. And there are too many formats - streaming MP3, Windows Media Player (somewhere it said this is also MP3), Ogg Vorbis (????), and Realaudio, and lots of required plugins and things still don't work unless I download the latest WMP for 60 minutes - forget it. I am taping CDs instead. Radio Swiss had nice music. Jim fixed a couple of computer speakers to sound slightly better by stuffing them with old orlon socks. The Linux Realaudio software appears to be about 2 versions out of date. Can Linux do the other streaming formats? (In a computer with more ISA slots, of course).
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Part of the standards for PCMCIA cards were upgraded after a couple years for better drivers, more funtionality, etc. They also decided that "PCMCIA" was too hard to remember or say, and created the term "PC card" as a replacement.
We have discovered that of our 11 pci video cards, only 2 of them will work in our 300 MHz pentium. So will an AGP card. The AGP card is S3 and my DOS ghostscript works only with Trident, Tseng, ATI or SVGA16. Does anyone know if linux ghostscript has VESA or S3 support? One of the working PCI cards is a Tseng but it has only 1M RAM in VESA mode and 256 colors in Tseng mode. Why won't the other cards work here????
ghostscript should work with any card you can get the X window system working for. I haven't heard of ghostscript being used with the text interface of Linux, but again, it should work with any card that the text interface works with, if you can. (The reason why DOS ghostscript only works with a few cards is probably because many DOS cards do nasty hardware-dependent things with the hardware, and they'll have only programmed it to do those things on those three cards. In Linux, "ordinary" programs (like Mozilla, lynx, OpenOffice, pine - an emailer - etc., *can't* do "nasty hardware-dependent things".
s/many DOS cards do/many DOS programs do/
Re resp:425: "Cardbus" works into this somewhere, too. I know that the Cardbus cards I've seen are keyed differently than older PCMCIA cards (the ridge on the side is a different height) and won't fit in some really old laptops. I think this is a 5V vs. 3.3V distinction. We have two laptops at work that will only take the older cards, which I can no longer get. Fortunately one of them just died in a way I can't fix, so I may finally get a budget to replace it.
Regarding ghostscript, I installed the console version of it, not X. In DOS, it works properly with Tseng but with Trident it displays and prints sideways. I set -sDEVICE=tvga as instructed for Trident. With ega and vga the Trident card also displays sideways. I will experiment with S3 and linux console ghostcript. Jim disconnected that computer from the monitor that works with S3 so he could experiment with scanners and Win98. I will put it back. Got to learn to print with linux soon. Last night, I hope, was my low point for immunity because I was up again coughing my head off until after 3 am. Jim was also up late but he says this is because he was testing a CD that turned out to be defective (the copy). We also have an ISA 56K modem that works perfectly with basiclinux but Win98 says it cannot communicate with it. I will stick that in the linux-only computer. Standard non-winmodem. Jim says if you make three primary partitions (for Windows, DOS and Linux) Windows will not recognize the other partitions - is this correct? Linux will recognize all of them, and DOS two of them. We have one 20G drive. I would consider putting in a Windows-only sound card and using Windows only as an internet radio since the Linux Realaudio is out of date.
Windows will recognize a DOS partition, but not a Linux partition.
DOS won't recognize a linux partition either, but will Windows recognize a SECOND primary partition? I really don't care, won't be using Windows for much of anything except to play with realaudio. Today we went through our CD-ROM drive collection. One requires a SONY controller, another might also require something odd as it worked in the 486 it came out of but won't work with a regular IDE controller. Recycled them both. We chose a drive that has little tabs that slide over the CD to hold it in place when the drive is vertical instead of horizontal because I want to put the tower computer under the monitor to save desk space. If i put it under the desk I cannot get at the back of it. Jim is thinking of putting in a second CD-ROM drive in teh computer with the CD writer but someone said it makes more accurate copies to copy to hard drive first and then CD, rather than between CD-ROM reader and writer. ? The second drive will be a challege since he used the space where the floppy drive was supposed to go to attach a hard drive after the previous owner put this out at the curb with the cage removed, and then put in a 5 1/2" version of a 3 1/2" floppy drive in the large bay where the CD-ROM drive is supposed to go. He will improvise a floppy drive cage somehow if it is really better to copy between drives. It might at least be less confusing. I read up on ghostscript and it looks like you might need to run it under X, which is a nuisance. Since this is my 'journal' I guess I can post anything I like in it, meaning whatever I happen to be doing while surviving chemotherapy, but this is certainly drift. Today I swept snow off the neighbor's walk and discovered that I get out of breath really fast. I have a long way to go before I feel physically normal again. Supposedly it takes 6-12 months after therapy ends. The neighbor is out now getting even with us.
By al means keep up the drift if you want to. I'm finding it
interesting to keep up with your everyday trials and tribbleations,
myself.
My understanding re: primary drives is this:
Linux or Windows, or just about any OS can be installed on a primary
partition. non-MS OSes can also be installed on logical partitions.
Most non-MS OSes can be coerced into reading Windows/DOS partitions,
although not all can read and write NTFS paritions (the type used by
NT, W2K, and XP.)
Further, an MS OS will recognize other primary or logical partitions
on the same drive, if they are formatted by an MS OS (caveat: DOS
cannot understand filesystems formatted for NT and versions of Windows
later than 3.1, at least not without added drivers). If >1 MS OS or
=>1 MS OS and OS/2 are installed on primary partitions, each OS will
see its own drive as C: and number the rest accordingly.
MS-OSes (anmd OS/2) number all primary partitions before all logical
partitions, thus with two hard drives in the same computer, each of
which has 2 primary and two logical partitions, the numbering for MS
OSes and Linux will be as follows:
Drive 1: MS Linux
Primary 1: C: /dev/hda1
"" 2: D: /dev/hda2
Logical 1: G: /dev/hda5*
Logical 2: H: /dev/hda6
Drive 2:
Primary 1: E: /dev/hdb1**
"" 2: F: /dev/hdb2
Logical 1: I: /dev/hdb5
"" 2: J: /dev/hdb6
* Linux reserves partition numbers 1-4 to primary partitions, whehter
or not there are four primary partitions, and always numbers logical
partitions from 5.
** This assumes that Drives 1 and 2 are on the same IDE channel. on
systems with 2 IDE channel, Drive 2 may be hdb, hdc, or, rarely, hdd.
If you use DR-DOS the partitioning gets further complicated (things are numbered in an unexpected order in linux). DR-DOS also won't recognize a FAT32 partition so if Windows shares a computer with DOS it needs to be Windows (MS) DOS. It should be interesting to have three partitions each formatted differently, on the same computer. I got 2 out of 3 ESS pci soundcards working with Win98. The third was dead but it took a while to figure this out since you cannot hear anything at all with headphones plugged into the speaker hole like you can with Creative sound cards since they have no amplifier (except the dead one did, and it probably burnt out). Also finally found the right video driver but did not think it was working until restarting Windows. It improved from 16 color VGA to 256 color 1024 and after restarting to 1600 res and 64K colors. Jim somehow managed to get a second CD ROM drive in his computer with the hard drive/floppy drive cage missing. I saw him doing something with a hot glue gun to cover up the surgery. He now has four CD burner programs to play with and will compare them and try to make two CDs into one 90 minute CD - is it possible to make a 90 minute CD? I made a 90 minute tape of them already. We are hoping tomorrow to be able to get Jim his flu shot. My cough continues to be pretty annoying - this morning I nearly threw up coughing again - and the platelet count is still down so I am still using old sheets to blow my nose into. I think I gained back the weight I lost during the first 10 days of the cough. It helps to drink orange juice with everything since everything tastes sour and orange juice is expected to taste sour. We mixed it with pineapple juice. Somehow the basement is not getting insulated. It has only been 21 years since the materials were purchased. Maybe when Jim feels better? The bill for the latest chemotherapy arrived. The cost of my miracle drug went up this time from $5000 to $5900, wonder why. This means I will be paying the full deductible next year for four CT scans and one chemotherapy since they add to at least $15,000. Two tylenol pills are $4.29. I was thinking of bringing my own to save the insurance company some money but it seems to upset the nurses when you even take your own vitamin pills.
Bummer about the bills, the pills and the cough. Bummer about hte insulation, yay for the weight gain. I believe the limit on CD-R(W)s is 80 mins, if you get ones that are specifically meant to last 80 mins, and you're lucky. I never tried DR-DOS (my first IBM-compatible was a Win95 machine. It is now rebranded as OpenDOS, I think, might try it out. I regularly have (more than) three partitions on my computer. Assuming I have Windows on at all, I usually have 1 partition for some flavour of Windows, 1 foran "expirimental" OS/Linux distro (slack, at the moment), and a couple for my main Linux distro - at the moment I have /, swap, and /home partitions though I plan to reformat and probably have /, swap, /home, /usr, /usr/local, /opt and /var. This is turning into Sindi's Lymphoma and Sindi and Jeff's OS Journal. Oh well.
We put all of our linux partitions into one ext2 partition which we formatted all at once. Why do you have separate ones? The weight gain was probably just clothing. Right now I just weighed in at 104 pounds, which after eating breakfast might be back up to 105. I think my neutrophil count might finally be going up slightly today. Got to sleep at a reasonable hour, woke coughing at 2:30 and again at 5:30 and then sneezed three times, which is a sign of some progress except I sneezed blood (low platelet count). I probably should not go sneeze at people at the library for the blind party. We will reevaluate the situation around noon and maybe vaccinate Jim tomorrow instead. I have been a 'virtual person' for 2.5 weeks now and would like to stop avoiding the rest of the world soon. I think Scott and Slynne said this cold lasts just under 3 weeks but without an immune system I bet it lasts a bit longer. I just washed four more handkerchiefs and filled a fifth. Cough cough, cough cough. I think my legs and knees and elbows are a bit less wobbly today, right on schedule, and my hands not quite as numb. I am a bit sore in the spleen area again (I was sore all last cycle but it improved for ten days now) probably from the coughing. My tongue even feels a bit less sandpapered and my throat is not raw. I get to feel better again for ten days now and after that it is only two more treatments and I will feel just as good as today in six weeks. Assuming I avoid the flu successfully. Some of the side effects have disappeared or are less severe. This cycle only one very small area of shredded skin around one fingernail. No jaw or upper arm pain (which occurred this time of previous cycles). Occasional aches in the IV hand but previous cycles it hurt for 1-7 days straight. No peeling skin on my feet. No thrush or mouth sores. Things still don't taste very good but no nausea. No headache (yet) this cycle, maybe in a few days. Hot flashes continue and it still hurts to sit. I should go lie down again for a while as the coughing has stopped.
Reasons to have separate linux partitions: 1. If you have an old BIOS, and more htan 1 OS on the same disk, you might need to make sure that all bootable partitions are under the old 8MB limit, in case the BIOS cannot boot partitions above 8MB. So you would need a x00MB /boot partition for Linux. 2. If you need to reinstall, or switch to a different distro, and want to keep your data and any programs you may have installed that aren't part of the standard distro, you can make separate /usr/local (that's a separate partition "local" under "/usr") and /home partitions that you tell the installation program not to format, thus preserving those progs and data. You can also have a couple of distros/UNIX-like OSes and keep all your data on one partition - though you'll probably have to have different user accounts on each, as each seems to store slightly different config files which could mess up your settings if you try to keep them together. For example, you could have accounts "debu", "slacku" and "rhu", for Debian, Slack, and RedHat, and on each distro create a group "user", writeable by al members, and create aa folder /home/data, onwed by group "user", with links to it in /home/rhu/data, /home/slacku/data, and /home/debu/data; or you could just use two of the distros for "bumming around in", and do any real work in one distro anmd not bother with the whole /home/data thing. 3. By separating / (or / and /usr) separate partitions, you lessen the chances that these partitions are going to be messed up if you mess up, say, the partition with /home in it; also, if you make /usr a separate partition, you can make this partition read-only, increasing security still further. 4. The other reasons all relate to servers. If you have, say, separate /, /boot, /tmp, /usr, /usr/local, /opt, and /var filesystems, users cannot accidentally or deliberately fill up the whole system by, say, keeping huge mail files in /var. (Although this is most useful in servers, nothing prevents you from doing it on desktops or single-function boxes like a computer set up to act purely as a firewall.) (Note that you can have a separate partion, for any or all of /usr and /usr/local). 5. One other reason that may not relate to servers. If you have two or more disks, and want to use more than one disk for linux, before Linux version 2.4 it was not possible to make a partition that covered all or part of more than one disk; thus you had to (and stil can) split partitions off so that, for example, / is on /dev/hda1 and /usr, /var, etc, are all on another (presumably much larger) hard disk. (Unix puristsmay replace the word "partition" with "filesystem" in mine and Sindi's last responses, passim.)
I think you mean the 8 *giga*byte limit, not 8 megabytes. Technically the BIOS limit on older machines is at 1024 cylinders, if I remember right. For home systems I often just create /boot and put everything else in /. For servers I like to seperate out /var, /usr, and /tmp, and sometimes other filesystems depending on the function. There are other good reasons for creating multiple partitions. Some boot loaders have trouble booting systems where root isn't one of a few specific filesystem types -- for example, some Linux distributions can't boot with a ReiserFS partition as root. But you might have reasons for wanting to use that filesystem for other parts of the system. Also, if a filesystem gets corrupted the damage is limited to one partition, so for example having / seperate from /home means if you blow up /home, you can still boot.
I do indeed mean the 8 GIGAbyte or 1024-cylinder limit, and thanks for clearing up the bit about blowing up /home.
I thought it was a 1G limit - is 1024 cylinders 8G? We boot from the DOS partition with loadlin and make DOS the first partition (or Windows 98). I am still operating as root except when using dosemu (which requires that it be used by 'user') but someone said to be 'user' when going online with a browser. I think you can dial as root and then switch to another terminal and be user before loading the browser or telnet program. I have not managed to get the dialer working except as root. What is the purpose of using three different linux distributions? Fun? We were going to go on our big adventure but I started coughing again. I cough so hard that my stomach contents starts rising - I can taste it. This never happened before - is it specific to this particular cold? How difficult is it to get a CD writer working with linux?
I usually do what I suggested in my earlier response - use one as my "main" (production/work) OS, and try out other distros on other partitions. I'm using Slack at the moment to get a more "hands on"/"Unixy" feel to things - slack is closest among Linux distros to what many consider to be "real distros", with RedHat/Mandrake/Xandros/Lindows being progressively less "Unixy" as you read from right to left. I'm having terrible trouble deciding between Slack and Debian. I was previously leaning towards Debian, as it comes with tons of software (so I wouldn't have to download much over dialup), and as I was afraid of compiling packages, which iirc recall correctly never worked properly for me before. (I might have needed to comile from source as not many people release software as Slackware .tgz packages anymore). However, the position is now more complicated as I have succesfully compiled a few packages (on Debian), and there is now the prospect of getting broadband fairly soon.
Re resp:441: No, 1024 cylinders is not the same as one gigabyte. Hard disks are physically laid out in cylinders, heads, and sectors. For example, a hard disk with two platters might have 600 cylinders, 4 heads (one for each side of each platter), and 63 sectors. Cylinders are like tracks on a floppy disk -- they're called cylinders because of using multiple platters. (Visualize projecting a cylinder down through all the platters, picking up one track on each one, and you get the idea.) In the days of MFM hard disks, the cylinder/head/sector settings in the computer's BIOS would correspond to the actual physical layout of the drive, but these days they're a fabrication of the disk controller -- they simply form a useful coordinate system for identifying specific bits of information on the disk. But the total capacity that a computer's BIOS can handle is limited by how big these numbers can get. This is where the limits on what the BIOS can boot come from -- it can only find boot sectors that are on the part of the disk it knows how to address. The limit used to be around 540 megabytes, but it was pushed out to 8 gigabytes by BIOS changes. Once the operating system is booted, it has other ways of addressing data on the disk, so the limitations imposed by the BIOS disappear. Re resp:442: If you like to tinker, you might want to try Gentoo.
I managed to compile three programs for Slackware and I also managed to unpackage a Debian package and use it with Slackware. You type ar -x filename.deb and it produces three files one of which is data.tar.gz and can be unpacked in the root directory. You can also use RPM packages with slackware if you unpackage them (using mc-menu or unrpm). SuSe 6 and Caldera 2 programs work with Slackware 7.1 in theory, but they might try to put things into nonexistent directories. Redhat has /usr/share/ and Slackware does not, for instance. Today we copied two music CDs to one 79 min CD (copied all but one piece, totalling 71 minutes). Jim put a second Cd drive in the computer, an 8X. One CD went into the CD writer, which reads 24X but copied the CD at 5X, and the 8X player copied a CD at 2X, both to hard drive. We may put in our 40X CD. I presume software and data files can be compressed so would copy faster. After we made the CD we tried to play it on the CD writer and it skipped, so we tried playing the original and it stopped after 30 sec or so at the part where it had skipped. We thought maybe we had made a bad copy but both the original and the copy play fine in the 8X player, so apparently the writer will copy files to hard drive just fine but not play music CDs properly. We wondered why someone put it out at the curb in a computer. To celebrate we walked to the library and supermarket, first time we had gone anywhere for a week. Jim carried back 16 pounds of grapefruits, a pomegranate, some brazil nuts and some ice cream. The latter two taste funny to me but I am trying to eat more calories. Jim offered to help eat them. The supermarket was full of turkeys, hams, electric roasters and broiler ovens, cookies, pies, and lots of cream cheese in two locations. They were playing some awful rock music rather than the expected Christmas music. I got back to the warm house and immediately started to cough, then was okay for the evening until I went to bed at which point I coughed to the point of almost throwing up again. Since I don't want to lose any calories, I got up for a while. I think my immunity goes down in the evening, also the mucus does not drain as well when I lie down. Jim's C++ book from half.com arrived. He loves reading computer books. I got some more CDs. It was actually faster to tape them because first teh program tested both drives, then it copied from them to hard drive, then it wrote from hard drive to CD (at 2X). Next Jim wants to try making a CD into some MP3 files. What compression rate is good for Beethoven? We may try variations and listen to the results.
Your best bet is to try some settings and listen to the results, because what sounds good varies greatly from person to person. MP3 is a lossy "psychoacoustic" encoding method; it relies on how your brain processes sound, and compresses files by dropping information where your brain won't notice it. A good lower end for testing stereo MP3s is 128 kbps. I find artifacts distracting at that bitrate, and consider my personal minimum to be 160 kbps, but some people can't hear any problems at 128. Encoders also vary a lot in quality. Bladeenc should be avoided, as it's one of the worst in my experience. LAME is pretty good. I haven't tried any commercial encoders so I can't comment on them. If I'm not concerned with fitting a lot of music into a small space, I'll sometimes use MP3 at 256 kbps. At that rate it's essentially indistinguishable from regular CD audio, to me.
Realone (realaudio) comes with a music CD maker that offers three settings for realaudio quality, one of which was 160 (168?) kbps and was chosen as the default. So we could also make our own .ram instead of .mp3 files. I think they also offer mp3 and wav. Does ram sound different from mp3 and do you know how that is encoded? I presume what they are transmitting at 20 kbps is encoded that way too. Some stations send at 64K (half of 128) or 48Kbps. Hard to tell if the cheap speakers or the encoding are what make it sound not so good. We might hook up a receiver and good speakers. This morning I woke coughing at 7:30 and got lots of blood on one of my improvsed hankies but then no blood on the next two, which suggests my platelets have gone up and maybe neutrophils will be numerous enough now too to shake off this cough. This particular virus appears to depress the immune system though, since Jim has had mouth sores and an infected fingernail that won't heal. Must be how viruses help cause cancer - they stop your body from fighting things off. Some of them also cause mutations. I keep getting emails from concerned translators and agencies, most recently from one in Texas where I used to do lots of medical translating. She says another of their translators died suddenly of cancer and she knows several other people dealing with it. The new epidemic. A library book said 43% of men will get cancer in their lifetimes and almost as many women. Lung, prostate, and colon are more common than lymphoma. You can reduce chances of some common cancers by eating properly, not being obese, and not smoking. This is a book on exercise that says exercise is good for the immune system (except when you have a fever). A library magazine suggested that you try to get exercise while doing chores, in order to lose weight, by wearing a 15 pound vest. Jim suggested gaining 15 pounds instead. Chores used to imply exercise. Another suggestion was to pace while on the phone - it finally struck me that the phone must not be attached to the wall likes ours are. SOmeone in the basiclinux mail list posted a link to WORD 5.5 for DOS, available for free download now from MS. 3.5MB. Supposedly makes smaller files than WP, but since it is gui I don't know if I can use it on a TTL monitor to translate with a gif on the VGA monitor of a 2-monitor system. With dosemu if I can figure out how to mount DOS drives to dosemu. Last time I tried to mount the C: drive under /usr/jim/ it acted like /tmp instead - listed me all the files in /tmp but in 8.3 format. There is a SUBST command - how does this work? http://download.microsoft.com/download/Word97win/Word55_be/97/Win98/EN-US/W in5 5_ben.exe I have no idea why WORD 5.5 for DOS is filed under Word97 for Win98 or what is be(n). Someone says if you omit the help files it fits on one floppy disk. Without dictionary. I will try WORD first in plain DOS, VGA and then HGC.
Leafing through the newly-arrived Winter 2003 issue of Cure magazine (www.curetoday.com): Ortho Biotech Products offers to send "valuable information on managing chemotherapy side effects." Send in the postcard or call 800.776-8998. Sidebar on "Unraveling DNA." "Gene analyzing techniques" have found a way to "(predict) the response to chemotherapy treatment." This "may help identify patients . . . who are unlikely to be cured by conventional therapy A Q&A on radiation therapy answers the query, "Will I be radioactive?" "Tumor Humor?" "Cancer isn't funny, but . . ." Book suggestions: "Not Now . . . I'm Having a No Hair Day" and "I'd Rather Do Chemo than Clean Out the Garage" Registration form for the first Patient & Survivor Forum, May 22-23, Dallas TX. $50 registration fee before 4/1. "Bexxar: Birth of A Drug" About a new radioactive adnitbody based therapy for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). Reader's Forum article by Doug Strawn, a NHL patient who played back-up with The Carpenters for 10 years.
Re resp:446: RAM probably is a different encoding scheme than MP3. I can't say whether it sounds better or worse at the same bitrate because I haven't tried it.
Ghostscript for linux DOES work in console mode using svgalib but there is no support for newer S3 cards. I could view as plain vga (illegible). When I tried to print the same way I do in DOS (-sDEVICE=deskjet) it took a few seconds and sent the pages somewhere but they did not print. I tried to understand the book about how to print but I could not, something about a print spool. How do I print things from a print spool? I ended up printing the four page file with DOS ghostscript. Someone sent me a translation.
I apparently need to install lpd - what then? Today things no longer taste odd, they taste bad and my tongue is sore and there is still slime on my teeth. In just six weeks things will start getting better for good. We are playing Beethoven's 9th Symphony and someone sent me a short translation (about bronchial asthma) to distract me. Jim is bug hunting because his little text editor does not scroll properly on wide files. First things first.
Re: #443: I do like to tinker; Gentoo is off limits until i get broadband; I get moaned at enough for taking up the phone line as it is. Re: #444: Slackware has no /usr/share? Hmm, have to lok at that again. Re: #450. With lpd installed, you should be able to pipe ghostscripts output to lp (a la "ghostscript somefile.ps | lp").
So if I do that (pipe to lp) will it automatically print? The format is gs -sDEVICE=deskjet -r300x300 filename.pdf I wish people would send me gifs instead of pdf files as they are easier to display and move around in and I don't need to print them. There is no point that I know of in making an image into a pdf file when there is no text in it.
Yes, the lp command says "print this"
Thanks. Today I only woke up twice coughing and then slept 6 hours straight without waking for anything but hot flashes and then even sneezed! This is the day in the cycle that they used to test my blood and discover my blood counts were back to normal. They could have been back for three days before that - no tests then. So I am still hoping the cough will go away soon. My tongue feels less slimy than it did. I noticed yesterday that there is a largish area of numb skin where they did the spleen biopsy. I wonder if anesthetic can have lasting effects? I am told there is some disagreement between grex's vt100 and the vt102 used by my xterm, which makes lynx display links double. Where might I go for definitions of the two of them? When I run kermit from xterm lynx is not usable, when I run it from console it is.
Your xterm may be using "vs100" instead of "vt100". If so, you can change
it with an option when the xterm you connect to grex from is started up.
Something like
xterm -tn vt100
Hmm, interesting. what's a "vS100"?
Among other things, it uses an "alternate screen" for less, vi and the like. so your command-line text is hidden while paging/editing, and the paged/edited text disappears when the pager/editor exits.
The xterm is defined with -tn vt102 - should I change to vt100? I am using one that was supplied to us with a few modifications to make it full-screen and have a scrollbar. I tried vt300 and it made things even worse - Pine displayed the cursor one line or two lines down from where it should be. In order to see things at grex without them wrapping I needed -geom 78x25, anything narrower made it wrap. But 78 cuts off the vertical right line of the terminal, not that I care. I can see all the characters. The scrollbar takes up a space or two but I need it to scroll back when using kermit. Kermit works fine without xterm but no scroll buffer that way. A friend offered to drop us off some Christmas cookies, on the porch.
AFAI am aware, if it has modifications then your terminal (a) only has support for them compiled in for vt102, or (b) should present a scrollbar with all vt types, so sswitching to vt100 would be a good idea.
I suggest reading the man page for xterm, Sindi. You can probably find the command line options you need, like "-geom 78x25". (I'm surprised your screen can't display an 80-column terminal, though.)
I fixed the problem with lynx by changing the font from 10x20 to linux8x16 but now bbs is messed up. Someone suggested specifying -fb (boldfont) as well as -fn since the links in lynx are in bold. Will try that next. To print I need to install lpr.tgz (contains lpd) and three parallel port modules parport parport-pc and lp. Will be back when I fix my terminal.
If I use -fn 10x20 the bold parts (links) in lynx are doubled. If I use -fn linux8x16 lynx is okay but bbs is scrambled. Someone suggested setting -fb (bold font). I could not find 10x20 bold but I did find 9x15 bold and set -fn 9x15 and -fb 9x15bold and it all works now but the print is awfully skinny. I will keep experimenting. Maybe I can mix 10x20 and 9x15bold or some other bold?
Today we learned to make mp3 files from Bach and Dvorak music CDs. Roxio and RealOne both have audio to mp3 conversion programs. RealOne converts at about 3 times as fast, Roxio at 1X but offers a few more sampling speeds. We tried 32 (sounds really garbled with sort of a whirring sound) 48 (which I think was a bit buzzy on the violin), 64, and 128, the latter two indistinguishable from the original to both of us. Jim now wants to record 10 CDs worth of music to one CD and play it all day long on the computer, which he hooked up to the stereo system with a very long cable. A couple of blocks from here we saw a discarded rubber thing that is used to go over electric cords so you don't trip over them - might go look for it again. Burn4Free free CD burning software, about a 1M download, will let you copy tracks from audio CDs, rearrange the order, rename the tracks, and burn them, and you can do almost all of this without a mouse (except for moving files around into different orders). We will use this and RealOne. I am putting ice cream on my oatmeal and eating it again for supper. The coldness sort of numbs my tastebuds. Jim is eating the chocolate with soggy rice crispy candy ice cream. The rice crispies taste sour to me. Anything starchy tastes sour, including cookies. A friend brought us cookies. I put cheese on the potatoes and managed to eat two bowls of them. I continue to shed. Jim had some old photos of me in the hospital with thick hair and very skinny arms. I would rather have thicker arms and thinner hair. I might try some exercises from the library book tomorrow.
Cough seems somewhat better this morning!
Goody! ;-)
It has changed into sneezing, hooray! I guess my immune system does not work instantly. If it gets better by Tuesday we may take the risk and go to Jim's sister's annual family get-together in Warren on Thursday. Jim is also sneezing and he is supposed to have a normal immune system. Today we went for a walk in the slush and looked at tree trunks. There was a burr oak with some unusual thick bark that was peeling off it from the bottom up, and the trunk of a huge willow (the branches fell through the nearby roof and were removed) with large round gnarly areas all over it and short skinny branches growing off the top in all directions. The lucky owners put a bench in front of it. Two birches. A variety of evergreens. One neighbor out shoveling slush for a 3-way shared driveway because one of the other neighbors (that we know) was in the hospital with a really bad sinus infection. We did not find the rubber thing to go over electric cords but Jim brought home a somewhat droopy abandoned poinsettia plant. The adjustible flagpole was still there next to it. I have been translating, one page at a time because it still hurts to sit. I think that is the symptom I would most like to go away, but it requires eating more so I guess I need my taste buds back first. Jim kindly ate the whole 2 half gallons of chocolate ice cream when I complained the first bowl tasted funny (it was the rice crispies in it not the ice cream). It took him under 48 hours. Not bad for a vegan out of training. I am reading Chaucer in modern translation (all about sex and violence and religion, with some drunkenness thrown in for laughs) and a good book on medieval art. Clothing styles closely paralleled architectural styles. People in the Romanesque period wore rounded hats, in the Gothic period very tall pointy ones, and they tried to pose in ogee shapes, and then in the Renaissance they tried to look short and squat and square with flat topped hats and squared shoes and super-wide shoulders. I also noticed a lot of parallels between 30s glassware and sweaters in two other books - both were relatively plain shapes decorated with narrow stripes or other fine patterns, as opposed to bicolor designs in the fifties.
ogee shapes?
The shape of the top part of a Gothic arch, somewhat S-shaped. They would pose with their torsos bent backwards and their heads bent forwards.
I have linux to the point where it sends the printer a page feed but it won't print. I installed lpd, insmod three needed modules, typed lpd, changed sh to bash in printcap for generic printer, and tried to print with lpr filename.txt Nothing appears to have gone to the print spool. lpq - no entries. What did I miss? The book says to use Redhat printtool. I don't have that.
Try rebooting; lpd should come on on its own. try lp instead of lpr.
There is no lp command on my computer. I also tried another method of printing that is supposed to send files directly to the printer and again I got just a paper feed. I then tried to print a test line with Jim's text editor and it printed the linux file I had been sending it instead. !? Seems like the file was sent to the printer by linux, but did not print until I tried to print something else. The printer works fine with DOS (unless it was first sent a linux file, apparently). I can print my files this way (typing lpr and then switching to DOS) but it is rather time consuming. May as well just copy them to the DOS partition and print from there.
cat myfile.txt > /dev/lp0 do anything for you?
I will check tomorrow on the linux computer. DOS is so much easier to use for connecting to grex since you don't need to fiddle with fonts and xterms in order to get a scroll buffer. Or change X resolutions and virtual screen sizes..... Console C-kermit has no scroll buffer. I think I already tried the cat to lp0 approach with nothing happening as it was in a book. I might try a different printer next, dot-matrix instead of HP540 (DOS inkjet). The latter might not be sufficiently 'generic'. I tried some other setup that sends things directly to the printer and it also just put out a blank page.
Sindi, you probably need to set up a printcap file (/etc/printcap) with a proper entry for the type of printer & some other stuff. (That's part of what printtool does for you.) There also are other things, which depend on what lpd you're using. (Likely alternatives include (but aren't limited to) CUPS and LPRng.) This gets complicated & messy to debug. But quite possibly some filtering is set up by default which assumes that the printer wants some particular type of input (such as PostScript) and converts what you send to that. Stairstepping text is also a likely problem. printcap & other configuration files control all that kind of stuff.
The problem might be that I was trying to print a DOS file with linux so I will try printing a different file that I write with pico. There is a default printcap file set up for generic printer that should have printed text. Today I am coughing but much less. It would have been no fun to cough during my CT this Wednesday because they make you lie down and keep still and lying down is what made me start coughing. I also just realized that my breathing has been okay for the past week and no rib pain, which means the fluid around my lungs has finally gone away after four months. Now if only fruit would stop tasting awful. Jim brought me frozen blueberries as a treat and I forced myself to eat four of them. He had to finish my small orange, much too sour. I think my sour taste buds must be the only ones not killed off. We might get Jim a flu shot today if he is also sneezing less.
We got Jim a flu shot. He was number 2 but they had to get to 25 before they started over again with 1. The waiting room was full of people aged 6 months to 2 years, talking to everyone, and their parents, who were talking about nothing but babies. I went out in the hallway to wait so I would not cough on them. On the way we stopped at Dynasty Chinese Buffet in Ypsi and I sampled the various fruits and vegetables. All the fruits tasted sour except the bananas and the unripe canteloupe (which did not taste at all, just crunched). They had four vegetables dishes, which don't bother me much. I made myself eat a few greasy things for calories (deep fried cream cheese in a crust, fried noodles with soup). Jim sampled the egg rolls and spring rolls several times each and ate what I could not manage to eat. We were there once just a year ago and were forced to listen to a CD of bad Christmas music (Silent Night in 4/4 time, other things jazzed up) but this time it was Nutcracker Suite and Night Music reorchestrated for the masses. The salad section was outstanding for a Chinese restaurant, not just iceberg lettuce. I ate cucumber, tomatoes, seaweed with too much garlic, carrot and daikon shredded with rice vinegar, some sort of cole slaw with minimal mayonnaise. Skipped the chocolate pudding and yellow jello and pizza and mini hotdogs. On the way back I climbed three sets of stairs at the library. Puff puff. It hurt a lot to sit for that long so we probably won't go to JIm's sister's place Thursday (3 hours of sitting to get there and back). I hope I did not catch the flu on our big adventure of the month.
Have you tried sitting on one of those funky pillows that is like a piece of foam in a wave, you know for better neck support? You might be able to get it so that the sore part is not in most contact.
Yesterday someone sent me a translation in the form of a zipped file containing two files whose names come out the same when truncated to DOS (one of those files named with a sentence including spaces). Jim suggested when it asks to overwrite the first file with the second file of the same name, to answer NO the first time, rename the first file, then unzip again and answer yes so that the second file overwrites the first one of the original name. I got two 1.2M files and converted to 10K text with Antiword. This seemed wrong, so I converted to postscript (after moving over a missing mapping file from the previous version and renaming the directory so it could be found). Still looks the same. Somehow MS converted two pages of text with a lot of blank spaces to 1.2M of WORD. I will download the free WORD viewer and take a look some day. The text is Polish and displays just fine with a VGA screen font. It won't import into WP51/DOS because they use a different system for symbols so I could not print it that way. I checked the printer manual for our HP 540 and unlike the manual for the HP 500 at my apartment it won't tell you how to access the built-in fonts for things like E. European (CP1252 or CP852) - use the software with your DOS program, its says, or order another manual by its part number. So I could not print out the file on my HP. My dot-matrix printer can't print Polish unless I design my own font for it and load it. I once designed a lambda for my 9-pin Star printer. So I translated between the Polish lines with Jim's text editor. I could have displayed the Polish and one document and translated to another document while switching between screens, but this was easier. At the other end they won't be able to print the Polish unless they have a printer with a good manual, because it does not import into WORD, which uses a different method of displaying and printing fonts. Or I could have tried to translate in Linux with a computer that had two video cards and two monitors (display the text on the VGA monitor, translate on the TTL monitor with any text editor) but I don't have this set up yet here. How else might I have done this other than downloading MS's free WORD viewer (does that also print?). Or using two side-by-side DOS computers. I woke up only once coughing my head off and today am not coughing yet.
Re 477, no I have not, and I just remembered that my 2" foam camping mat actually came with one and I have it in the closet. Thanks.
Major events of today: Hospital called to remind me to arrive at 1 pm tomorrow for CT scan and not to eat or drink anything after 6 am. I am debating whether to get up and eat in the middle of the night like people do for Ramadan. A friend who brought cookies stopped by again with fruit cake but would not come in so as not to infect me. We went for a walk in the rain and looked at Christmas lights. One house had a striped red and green effect on their bushes. Another had a 'tree' consisting entirely of a metal frame with pink lights. There were at least four styles of reindeer. The pumpkins were more interesting. It is getting harder to find things to look at. Maybe we will look at porch steps next.
You have several choices: