Replies

Michael,

I have a PC running Ubuntu 14.04 with Samba installed and my home directory (/home/michael) shared as ‘michael’. On the same network I have a Windows PC running WIN8.1 (updated). I can ping the Linux PC from the Windows PC and McAfee running on the Windows PC shows the Linux PC in its network (but claims it is offline). However, when I go to the Network section of File Explorer on the Windows PC I cannot see the Linux PC or the shared directory.

You didn’t mention if you were running Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop or Server edition so I’m assuming it’s the Desktop edition with Ubuntu’s “Unity” interface.

The first step is to see if Samba is running and accepting any kind of connection…

[*]Open a terminal window.
[*]Run the following command (part of Samba’s client utilities):

[INDENT]smbclient -L localhost[/INDENT]

(If the smbclient program isn’t available, run the command “sudo apt-get install smbclient” in the terminal window to install it.)

[*]You’ll likely be prompted for a password, but just hitting [Enter] should be fine.

If it all goes as expected, you should see output like the following (instead of “LINUX-PC”, it will be the name you gave your computer):

[INDENT]Enter michael’s password:
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 4.1.6-Ubuntu]

Sharename Type Comment
——— —- ——-
IPC$ IPC IPC Service (linux-pc server (Samba, Ubuntu))
print$ Disk Printer Drivers
HP-LaserJet Printer HP LaserJet
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 4.1.6-Ubuntu]

Server Comment
——— ——-
LINUXPC linux-pc server (Samba, Ubuntu)

Workgroup Master
——— ——-
WORKGROUP LINUX-PC
[/INDENT]

Next, test connecting to the network share…

[*]Run the following command:

[INDENT]smbclient ‘\localhostmichael'[/INDENT]

[*]If you set a password for the network share, enter it when prompted.

(The password is not necessarily the same as your login password for Ubuntu. Windows uses a different cipher than Linux. Because the passwords are encrypted using a one-way hash, Samba needs to store the encrypted passwords in its own database.)

If successful, you should see something like this:

[INDENT]Enter michael’s password:
Domain=[LINUX-PC] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 4.1.6-Ubuntu]
smb: >[/INDENT]

The program smbclient works like a command-line FTP client (type “help” or “?” for a list of commands). Type “ls” to see if it shows the contents of your home directory.

I am sure that I should be able to see each device from the other, but I can’t!

The Linux PC can see (using nmap) the router, itself, the printer and 3 other devices (not the Windows PC). I don’t know what these are. One says “PORT State Service and has telnet and btx ports open. The other 2 devices say all 1000 ports are closed.

The telnet and btx ports might be from your router or even the printer if it has both wired and wireless interfaces.

Part of the reason that the Linux and Windows PCs aren’t able to easily see each other is because Windows (since XP SP2) has a firewall enabled by default. In Windows Vista and higher, even ICMP Echo (aka. Ping) packets are ignored by default. A quick scan using Nmap only tests each IP address with a ping. If there’s no response, it’s assumed that nothing is there. But even a deep scan targeting a specific IP address might not reveal much depending on the firewall settings.

Linux distributions include a built-in firewall (Netfilter + iptables), but not every distribution enables it by default. RHEL/CentOS/Fedora does, but Ubuntu and many of the Ubuntu-based distributions often do not.

In Linux, to quickly see if there are any firewall rules, run the command:

[INDENT]sudo iptables-save[/INDENT]

(The command “iptables -L” can also be used, but the raw output can be harder to read, while nicely formatted “iptables-save” output can be imported by “iptables-restore”.)

Ubuntu also includes a custom utility called “ufw” to manage the firewall rules. A few examples:

[INDENT]ufw status
ufw disable
ufw enable
[/INDENT]

The Windows PC (file explorer) can see itself, the router and the printer. It cannot see the Linux PC or any of the 3 other devices that the Linux PC can see.

Windows Explorer’s network browsing only scans for network shares so it’s not able to compete with Nmap. Once we know that your Linux PC can see its own network shares, the next step is to test the connection from Windows:

[*]Open a command prompt.
[*]Run the command:

[INDENT]net use u: \ip-address-of-linux-pcmichael[/INDENT]

(Windows assumes that the current username and password are the same as the one on the remote computer. If your Windows login name is not “michael” (case-sensitive), then you’ll need to change the command to:

[INDENT]net use u: \ip-address-of-linux-pcmichael /user:michael[/INDENT]

[*]When prompted, enter the Samba password you set up on the Linux PC.

If successful, the command will return a “Command completed successfully” reply and you’ll be able to browse the contents of your home directory on the Linux PC via the “u:” drive in Windows.

I have scoured the web and tried many things but I can’t even get as far as trying to get the Windows PC to log into the Samba share on the Linux PC – it can’t even see the Linux PC.

Your help and suggestions would be much appreciated.

Michael Barraclough

So, when troubleshooting network file/printer sharing, a few tips:

[*]As Paul T also recommended, rule out any firewalls. On a private network, it might be helpful to temporarily turn off any firewalls to keep things simpler. On Windows PCs, the built-in firewall might be replaced by a third party firewall (e.g. McAfee, Norton, ZoneAlarm), making things even more complicated.
[*]Inside a home network, there’s really no benefit to blocking ICMP Echo (Ping) packets. It makes debugging network connections a lot easier if all of the devices can be pinged. Most home users are using NAT so the rest of the Internet isn’t going to be able to ping the computers behind the router anyhow so there’s no need to hide the home devices from each other. In Linux, ping is usually not blocked by default. For Windows, Google “Windows 8.1 ICMP Echo” for detailed instructions.
[*]Avoid using the graphical tools for troubleshooting because they often hide valuable debugging info. For example, the command-line tool “net” in Windows is a lot more helpful with finding out if the problem is the network connection, the share name, the username or password, while Windows Explorer often spits out the same error message for all of the above.

Just to follow-up on the earlier posts, an EXT 2/3/4 driver for Windows isn’t needed unless you’ll be plugging in some hard drives or flash drives into your Windows PC. Samba on Linux provides a SMB/CIFS server, which Windows already supports.

Chung

Our family has a Gmail Account. Defined as a POP3 account. My wife and I have our own PC’s and we used to each get emails from the same GMail Account. She runs Outlook, I run Windows Live Mail. In each of our PC’s, the Gmail Account is defined to leave mail on the server for 55 days… this gives the other of us ample time to get around to requesting our copies of mail from that Gmail Account (really done everyday, until we have Vacation or something…). Now, however… She does not get the emails that I have gotten and I don’t get the ones she has. I don’t know what has changed to cause this, but it isn’t working the way it used to. From a browser, we can see all the emails still on the Gmail servers… Any help/direction appreciated.. TIA.

Hi RobG,

It sounds like the message download status is out of sync in Outlook and Windows Live Mail. POP3 doesn’t natively support storing message status info on the mail server so the status is recorded by the local mail client. I don’t know of a way to force Outlook/Live Mail to re-sync, and even then, it would likely cause all of the message still in the mail server inbox to be seen as unread (not by Gmail, but by the local mail client).

If the risk of loosing the message status is okay, one option is to first back up the existing messages in the local inbox to a local mail folder. Next delete the POP3 account from Outlook and then recreate it. The newly added account will see all the messages left in your Gmail inbox as new.

Based on your current setup and usage, switching from POP3 to IMAP would be a better long term solution. The “leave mail on server” feature of POP3 really only works well with a single computer and POP3 wasn’t designed to handle multiple mail clients at the same time so there’s always the risk of lost or hidden emails due to race conditions. IMAP supports bidirectional sync so message status is stored on the mail server (and cached on the client side).

Chung

Hi Les,

Sorry for the delayed reply. I got bogged down with work-related projects and almost forgot.

Yes, FF by default has Javascript enabled. It may with tracking down the cause by comparing the “pref.js” file that FF uses to store most of its user settings. It’s very likely that there are differences between the laptop and desktop because upgrades and other changes alter the file in a different order.

Since FF 13.0, there’s been a profile “reset” feature added to help with troubleshooting and repairing corrupted settings. It won’t track down the exact cause, but it’s a handy alternative to creating a new profile:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems?esab=a&s=reset&r=2&as=s

Hi Mike,

Because you mentioned “trusted home network”, I’m assuming that the laptop is running Windows. Which version is it? Windows XP, Vista/7 and 8 have really different network configuration dialog boxes.

As other members have already recommended, checking whether or not the laptop is getting an IP address assignment is the first step. Home and college WiFi networks usually (hopefully) have some kind of wireless security enabled so it requires more work to set up a connection. Cafes and other retail outlets usually set up public hotspots with no authentication other than agreeing to the terms of use so connection problems are usually hardware/software related (e.g. not all WiFi devices are compatible with all WiFi access points, and vice versa.) Hardware issues aside, check the network trust settings to see if only your home network was trusted. Depending on the configuration, accessing the Internet from all other WiFi networks might be blocked.

One thing you might try is a remote desktop connection to make it easier to diagnose the WiFi problem. Chances are that the college has a lot of rooms with network data jacks that your daughter could temporarily use. Rather than deal with enabling remote desktop in Windows/Mac, use TeamViewer (teamviewer.com) to make a temporary connection. The service is free for private use and requires no registration and/or software installation (the software is a small standalone program). When you launch the program, you select whether you are the one sharing or connecting to a remote computer. For whoever is sharing, the program generates a random PIN. The connecting computer uses the PIN to authenticate and the person on the remote computer must still confirm the connection for extra security.

Chung

Hi Alan,

Quick question: When you are trying to start a scan, are you using the control panel on the printer or using Epson’s desktop software? If you’re using the LCD panel on the printer, which option are you using? (See page 98 in the Artisan 730 User’s Guide.)

You mentioned that “the printer cannot see the main computer”, which if that’s what you’d like to do, it requires a different setup on your desktop computer because you would be pushing scans from the printer to the desktop computer. In order for that to work, your desktop computer would need to run WSD (Web Services for Devices). That in turn would require certain changes to your desktop computer’s firewall settings, etc.

As far as the wired and wireless connections, if the router is a combination router and WiFi access point, then the wired network ports and wireless connection will typically share the same IP address range (in more technical terms, the networks are “bridged”). However, most decent WiFi routers will allow you to assign separate IP address ranges to the wired network and the wireless network. If that’s the case, then the laptop and printer running on the wireless network will be invisible to the wired network (and vice versa).

If you’re familiar with the web interface for the router, check the settings. Otherwise you can also easily compare the network setting between the laptop and desktop by running a simple command. Assuming that you’re using Windows 95 or newer, start up a command prompt either from the Start Menu or the shortcut key combination [Windows Key] + [R] and typing “cmd”. In the command prompt window, type “ipconfig”. Compare the “Default Gateway” address from each computer. Chances are it’s a private IP address in the Class C address range (e.g. 192.168.0.1).

Hi Les,

In Example 1 the hertz.com homepage loads a small JavaScript tester that redirects your web browser to a different page depending on whether JavaScript is enabled or not. As a simple test, in Firefox I have the NoScript add-on installed. With scripting disabled, I see the page matching your screen shot 1. When I temporarily allow scripting for hertz.com, it displays the normal homepage with the “Book a Car” reservation box on the left side of the page. I suspect that either a Firefox add-on, plug-in or even the JavaScript settings could be different on the desktop. Also some anti-malware scanners will install web browser add-ons or plugins that filter scripts and other web content for malware. The main navigation menu renders the drop-down menus using CSS so it should look the same on two identical versions of Firefox unless there is some kind of content filtering going on.

In Example 2, the web server returned the error message “HTTP Status 404” — basically the web equivalent of “File Not Found”. The link in the menu is pulling content from a third party website into a browser frame within Southwest’s website. Typical reasons for the error include the partner website being down at the time you clicked on the link. It doesn’t look like the webpage is dynamically building the URL using JavaScript so the next time the error occurs, try skipping the menu link by going directly to the points center page (http://www.southwest.com/rapidrewards/points-center) to see if it makes a difference. One additional wrinkle is the fact that the page pulls content in from another website to display within a frame. Depending on the web browser and anti-malware scanner that’s installed, it can produce different results because mixing content from different websites (especially if some of the content is a combination of HTTPS and HTTP) may be blocked for security reasons.

Also, with IE, check the “Internet Options” to see if SmartScreen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SmartScreen) is enabled.

On a slightly related note, an easy way to duplicate your exact settings (plus add-ons) for Firefox is to copy the profile from one computer to another. In Windows 7, look for your Firefox profile in “C:UsersLesAppDataLocalMozillaFirefoxProfiles” (substitute “Les” for your Windows username.) Unless you have more than one Firefox profile configured, there should only be one folder with a randomly generated name (e.g. ak31ri37.default.) Copy the folder to/from your desktop to your laptop. The username doesn’t need to be the same because Firefox locates the profiles via a relative path (i.e. %USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalMozillaFirefoxProfiles) rather than an absolute path.

Just an FYI, I removed the Width in the #navbar2 earlier this morning. I saved the file, but didn’t see any changes when viewing the page in Mozilla or Chrome–the navigaiton still interfered with links on the top of the content sections. Now a few hours later, I tried again, and the links are available and can be accessed on Mozilla and Chrome. There must have been a delay of somekind on our server. Anyway thanks so much for your effort on this one. We all ENJOYED your post so much, Judy

Hi Judy,

Glad it worked out. 🙂

One catch with testing in web browsers is that the built-in content caching is designed to hold onto documents in an effort to speed up the web browsing experience. The downside is that when a secondary document like a stylesheet is updated, the old version is often still used by the web browser for a little while after it was updated.

The reload button in web browsers really acts more like a page refresh button in most cases because often only the main webpage is reloaded. Plus the web server also has its own disk cache that adds additional delay to when a change really takes effect.

A handy trick in Firefox is to hold down the [Shift] key before clicking the reload button. When holding down the [Shift] key, Firefox ignores the file time stamps and reloads the current webpage plus all of the supporting content (images, stylesheets,…) — this makes stylesheet changes take effect almost instantly in the web browser. For keyboard shortcut junkies like me, [Ctrl + R] and [Ctrl + Shift + R] are the mouse equivalents. If you have access to the web server traffic logs, you can watch the effect holding the [Shift] key has. The difference is pretty dramatic with complex webpages.

Chung

I’m not sure if this is the appropriate place for this post or even if the Lounge has a place to help with this issue. Our problem is how a page displays in FirieFox or Chrome.
We’ve just discovered that all the pages with links on our County Internet page do not work correctly with FireFox or even Chrome. They work fine with Internet Explorer Browsers. We have a CSS navigation with flyouts master template applied to all pages.

I believe the problem happens when any page has a link that is under what would be the flyout if it were present. It’s kind of hard to explain as I likely don’t have the right terminology! Hyperlinks just don’t work when on the top part of pages when viewed with FireiFox or Chrome. I din’t create the site, but rather am one of the people who maintain it now.

Here are a couple of page links that might better illustrate the issue, if you view them with FireFox: http://www.co.siskiyou.ca.us/website/services.aspx http://www.co.siskiyou.ca.us/website/localgov.aspx

I’m open to suggestions. I’d just like to make it work correctly with FireFox in paprticular.

Hi Judy,

I took a look at one of the pages you referred to (http://www.co.siskiyou.ca.us/website/services.asp). In the page, the left navigation menu references CSS id “navbar2”. From the stylesheet http://www.co.siskiyou.ca.us/css/navbar.css:

[INDENT]#navbar2 {
[/INDENT]
[INDENT=2]font-family: arial, sans-serif;
[/INDENT]
[INDENT=2] width:550px;
height:150px;
position:relative;
margin:0;
font-size:12px;
margin:50px 0;
[/INDENT]
[INDENT=2] }
[/INDENT]

As you most likely already know, “navbar2” helps position the left navigation menu by creating a transparent floating box. Without it, the search box would be partially covered up by the left navigation menu.

The problem is that the transparent floating box is a bit too wide (550 pixels) and it’s laying right on top of the hyperlinks in the main body (e.g. Anonymous Crime Tips, Assessor Parcel Data, …). A simple test to verify this is by trying to use the mouse pointer to select some of the hyperlink text such as “Board of Supervisors – Minutes”. In Firefox, Chrome and Safari, the only way to select the hyperlink text is to select a large part of the page which grabs the entire bulleted list of hyperlinks. Another test is to add more text to one of the left navigation menu items (i.e. change “Departments” something like “Departments Departments Departments Departments”) and notice how it doesn’t word wrap but continues until it overwrites the top of the bulleted list of hyperlinks with white text.

I’m guessing the idea might have been to make the floating box as wide as the 3rd sub navgiation menu, but it’s not necessary. An easy fix is to take out the “width:550px” parameter and just let the box adapt to the width of the contents. I mirrored part of the web site and tested the change and it seems to do the trick (I’m definitely not a CSS expert, so someone out there with better skills might have a better fix). I tested the modified CSS and the pages work with Firefox 9, Chrome 16, Safari 5, Opera 11 and IE 9.

While we’re on the topic of web development and web browsers…

Although each version of IE has been getting better and better at supporting Internet standards, one thing that doesn’t seem to have changed is that when IE encounters a coding error (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.), it appears to make an educated guess as to what the web developer might have intended and then takes that action instead. On one hand, this means that even broken web pages can be automatically ‘fixed” on-the-fly so that users aren’t inconvenienced. But the flipside is that the person doing the web development might never notice that there is a bug in the webpage.

In the past, Mozilla/Firefox has gotten a bad rap from web developers for its stance on sticking as close to the web standards possible. Chrome and Safari (they share the same WebKit layout engine) along with Opera are also very good about following web standards. Although IE for the Mac is no longer available, one interesting thing I found in working with IE in Windows and Macs is that they do not handle web pages identically — bugs that cause no problems in IE for Windows could behave badly in IE on Macs. A while back I had read somewhere that IE for Windows and the Mac were developed by two separate teams at Microsoft (from my own experience, the Mac version of IE seemed to be more standards compliant than the Windows version so there does seem to be a significant difference in design).

Several years ago I was helping a co-worker debug an online ordering application and he had invited a small group of people to test the application. Part of the form had a simple date selector using a pop-up calendar written in JavaScript. One user was using Netscape on a Mac and was having problems with the calendar. He got into a heated argument with the user when he insisted that everything worked fine when he tried it (… using only IE) and that the user must have been doing something wrong or her Mac was the problem. Totally frustrated, he asked me to talk to the user and try to convince her that his web app was working fine and to do what I could to fix her Mac. A couple of hours later after having talked to the user (whom I had known for a few years) and then taking a look at my co-worker’s web app, I found a bug in the JavaScript code he was using to generate the pop-up calendar. Like my co-worker had said, the calendar really did work fine in IE. The big problem was that it didn’t work at all in Netscape/Mozilla or any other web browser I tried.

So developing a website and testing with Firefox before IE makes a lot of sense because it also helps avoid the temptation of using IE-only features. What works in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera will generally work in IE (at least the newer versions… IE 6 and it’s younger siblings… argh!).

Fortunately, the newest round of the “browser wars” are about which web browser has the best support for upcoming web standards like HTML 5 and CSS 3 instead of who has the largest user base.

Hope this helps, 😎

Chung

I am booting a Dell Open Manage Live CD, which appears to have a variant of Linux on it, with the intention of not ever, ever, writing anything to the server’s hard disk

1) I need to install the Wake-on-LAN package ‘into memory’ (a new but interesting concept for a Windows person).
I am root.
I am told I need to do apt-get install ether-wake in a Terminal session but this fails because it seems to be accessing the CD, and the package is not there.
What is the sequence of commands that I should issue to enable me to install this package from “the internet”?

2) I need to write debugging information to a file, presumably on a USB Flash drive, and the command I have been given is (in part) tcpdump -w test.pcap
When I terminate this packet capture (with Ctrl+C) I presume the file is closed off – but I have no idea where it is located (bearing in mind that I have booted from a Live CD), nor how to copy it to a USB Flash drive for later examination.
Again, could someone provide the sequence of commands to enable me to do this?

Thanks!

Hi,

It’ll probably help to first go over how a Live CD works (although many Live CDs use Linux, there are others). In a nutshell, during the boot process, a portion of the available RAM is used as a virtual drive to hold the operating system. A Live CD is designed to either run entirely from RAM or to load a basic system into the virtual drive and then access additional files from the boot media (not limited to CD/DVDs; can also be USB flash drives, hard drives, zip disks, etc.). Once the OS has been booted, it functions pretty much like a regular hard drive installation. The main difference is that it doesn’t normally write/save anything to local storage media.

One huge difference between Windows, Macs and Linux is software management. In Windows, the majority of software installations are done by 1) Inserting a CD (or downloading from the Internet), 2) Running a setup program, 3) Answering a series of questions. The steps are repeated for each software package. To uninstall software, the Add/Remove Software tool in the Windows Control Panel is normally used. The process is similar for Macs except uninstalling usually involves dragging the software from the Applications folder into the Trash.

In contrast, most Linux distributions use a software package management system to handle installing, uninstalling and upgrading software. The software package management system maintains a catalog of the currently installed software along with software that is available for installation from software repositories (aka. “repos”). The software catalog is automatically updated as the list of packages changes. Software can still be installed without using a package manager but is usually not necessary. Most Linux distributions use software packages in RPM, DEB or TGZ/TXZ format (similar concept to Windows .msi and Mac OS X .dmg files) and the package format depends on the package management system that’s being used.

As is often the case with Linux, just about everything has both a console and a graphical interface. The line “apt-get install ether-wake” is using the command “apt-get” to install the software package “ether-wake”. apt-get is a part of APT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Packaging_Tool) which uses the DEB (Debian) package format.

Without knowing more details about the computer hardware or what exactly is trying to be accomplished, it’s not easy to write step-by-step instructions. There are several reasons that apt-get would be trying to install the package from the boot CD including:

[*]The list of software repositories only includes the original boot CD so the package manager is checking the CD for “ether-wake”.
[*]There is no Internet connection for the package manager to retrieve the latest package lists (or the online repositories are no longer available) and it is defaulting to the CD.

The command “tcpdump -w test.pcap” would save captured network packets to a file named “test.pcap”. The file would be saved to the current directory. In Linux, each user’s home directory is the starting point after login. For “root” that is located in the directory /root (in a very loose way, it could be seen as the equivalent of C:root in Windows). Because the Live CD is running from RAM, /root is actually stored in a virtual drive. Bear in mind that packet captures can generate quite a lot of data so saving it to the virtual drive could eat up all of the available storage very quickly.

Unlike Windows, Linux maps storage devices to directories rather than to drive letters. Since you’re using Linux via a console, you don’t have the benefit of the graphical tools for accessing storage devices, but it’s not difficult to do via the command line:

[*] Mount the USB flash drive. If the computer is less than 3-4 years old, this should work… 1) Make a directory for the mount point: “mkdir /mnt/myflashdrive” 2) Mount the flash drive: “mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/myflashdrive”. If you get no error message, then it worked.
[*] Run “tcpdump -w /mnt/myflashdrive/test.pcap” to save network packets from the default network interface (usually “eth0” for wired, “wlan0” for wireless) to the file /mnt/myflashdrive/test.pcap.
[*] Unmount the device before unplugging the USB flash drive: “umount /mnt/myflashdrive”. If you get no error message, it’s good.

One gotcha that you might run into with the commands above is that the device /dev/sdb1 is not assigned to your USB flash drive. That can easily happen if you have multiple hard drives or flash drives already connected. In Linux, the first drive detected is designated as device “sda”, the next one “sdb”, then “sdc” and so on. The integer number appended to the drive designation is the partition number (i.e. “sdb1” is the first partition on the second storage device). The easiest way to locate the correct device is to check the kernel log before and after the USB flash drive is plugged in:

[*] Make sure the USB flash drive is unplugged. Wait a second or two.
[*] Run the command “dmesg | tail -20”. “dmesg” dumps the current kernel log to the screen. We’re not interested in all of the other information that scrolls by so we’re filtering out everything but the last 20 lines of the output by piping it through the command “tail -20”.
[*] Plug in the USB flash drive.
[*] Repeat the command “dmesg | tail -20”.

Look for a series of lines similar to the sample below:

Code:

usb 2-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0930, idProduct=6544
usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 2-2: Product: DataTraveler 2.0
usb 2-2: Manufacturer: Kingston
scsi9 : usb-storage 2-2:1.0
scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] 7827392 512-byte logical blocks: (4.00 GB/3.73 GiB)
sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off

In this particular case, “[sdb]” is the device that my Kingston DataTraveler was assigned when I plugged it in. Since most USB flash drives come pre-formatted with just one partition, the device name to use in the mount command would be /dev/sdb1. Depending on the number of drives present, it could also have been assigned “sdc1”, “sdd1”, etc.

“ether-wake” is a tool for sending WOL (Wake-On-LAN) packets. If you have to use the version of OpenManager you currently have and can’t get a hold of the tool in the software archives, it may be easier to use a Perl script (http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/S/SR/SRAMKI/wol.pl) since Perl is included on many Linux Live CDs. There are a lot of WOL utilities available on the Internet.

By the way, I checked Dell’s website and the current versions of OpenManager are based on the CentOS Linux distribution which defaults to booting into a full graphical desktop so it might be easier for new users to use. Using the command line to do networking tasks can be complicated in any operating system (Windows and Macs would be just as difficult without their respective GUI interfaces).

Chung

The web browser which comes with Linux Mint is Firefox, which I also use in Win 7 (along with IE) Since I installed the 64 Bit edition of Linux Mint, the 64 Bit edition of FF is installed. Adobe does not yet have a 64 Bit Flash available, but in Fred’s Original ThreadJeremy Davis gives an excellent post on how to get a Flash 64 Bit alternative that works well in 64 Bit Linux Mint. For those of you that choose to install the 32 Bit version of Linux Mint I suspect the 32 Bit version of Adobe Flash will work well.

Hi Ted,

Adobe has been working on a 64-bit Flash Player for a while. The first alpha release was for Linux so you’re in luck. :o)

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_64bit.html

I’ve upgraded to a newer Dell but still had problems with
Mint/ Ubuntu/ Suse.

I’m working on “PuppyLinux 500” now and I have it installed
on a thumb drive, but having a problem with grub to let me
boot up to the hard drive install….

The thumb drive took several tries but I finally got the sound
card to work in it, now if I can get past the grub looping problem
I can transfer all my settings to the hard drive.

(The thumb drive runs only in ‘RAM’)

GB

The sound problems are pretty odd given that most Dell PCs use fairly standard sound cards (except maybe the really old Dell PCs that had the S3 video cards and chipsets). During the past few years the only time I’ve run into a problem with sound was during the switch from ESD to PulseAudio. In Linux, programs usually send audio to a sound server like ESD or PulseAudio. The advantage is that multiple programs can generate audio at the same time (the sound server mixes the multiple audio streams). The sound server is also not limited to the same computer (i.e. a music player can run on one PC and the audio comes out from the speakers on a different PC). There’s also the ability to combine multiple sound cards for interesting effects like 3-D sound, etc.

Is Puppy Linux also installed on the hard drive? Is the Dell mostly a test system or are you planning on using it on a regular basis as a main computer? The reason I ask is if it’s going to be used regularly and has 512 MB or more of RAM, I’d recommend sticking with Ubuntu (10.04 was released last month and it’s a LTS = Long Term Support version that’ll be supported for the next 3 years or more).

For the sound problem, if you do switch back to Ubuntu and don’t mind providing a little detailed info about the hardware, I should be able to help you get it set up with minimal work. There are several “Device Manager”- style programs in Linux for viewing the hardware profile, but the “lspci” command is easy to use and it’s handy for copying-n-pasting the output. Open a terminal and type “lspci”. It’ll dump info about all of the PCI devices that are installed. Unless it’s a really old computer, the sound card will be a PCI device. From the output, we can figure out exactly what driver will be needed.

Chung

Sound Card update:

Removed Creative sound card and reactivated the Dell built-in card
On reboot Linux sees “NOTHING” now — search for drivers ‘ZIP’/ Zero!

Found another creative sound card, (CT4520) rebooted and again
I’ve got nothing.

Found website: NoDevice.com has a ton of drivers but not one of
the linux drivers were for my card…. nor for the Dell.

GB

Hi GB,

Any luck with the sound card(s) in Linux?

Overall, Sound Blaster cards are pretty well supported in Linux. It could be a hardware related problem or something to do with Ubuntu (Mint and several other distributions are based on Ubuntu so they will likely have similar configurations under the hood).