Re: The quest for rodent power
On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 06:02:26PM -0800, Harry Putnam wrote:
> Vineet Kumar <debian-user@virtual.doorstop.net> writes:
>
> > /usr/sbin/gpm -D -m /dev/psaux -t ps2 -Rraw
...
> That gives me some almost laughable output:
>
> root # /usr/sbin/gpm -D -m /dev/psaux -t ps2 -Rraw
> Alarm clock
I've checked the gpm source (gpm-1.19.6) and there is no clock or
Alarm there at all. There are some alarm calls, but I'm not aware
that that call produces this output. So I find this very strange.
Maybe someone with C experience can chime in to tell whether there
is a system call that produces "Alarm clock" as output?
Well, I'm intriguid, so I did some testing:)
When on a potato system I chroot into a woody system and try the above
command *while there is still* a gpm daemon running, I get the exact
same message and gpm returns almost immediately. But when I kill that
potato gpm daemon, than the above incantation works as expected.
I then went on, kill the potato daemon, did the above magic incantation,
put it in the background and ran another one. Same message thit time.
This to me implies there is a gpm daemon afterall.
> But still not running:
> root # ps waxu|grep gpm
> <nothing>
I don't mean to belittle you, you seem to know your way on a linux
machine, but as I don't really know you, nor how far you knowledge
goes, nor what you're actually doing, I'm bound to ask some stupid
questions. I'm sorry for that, but here I go:
e.g. I.m curious whether the above long gpm command
# /usr/sbin/gpm -D -m /dev/psaux -t ps2 -Rraw
did return immediately or kept running and that you did the
# ps waxul|grep gpm
in a different xterm/console
It's the way you worded the events that made me wonder.
Probably it's just that you wanted to make sure that gpm
didn't put itself in the background although the -D option
told it not to, but I'm not sure.
> Also to clear the record here. Some are suggesting
> /etc/init.d/gpm is not present or other such basic things.
Well, I'm still curious whether the *content* of that file is sane.
It's such a strange error w're dealing with here, that I think we
should eleminate all things step by step, and some of those steps will
seem silly, but they are in no way ment to imply you don't know what
you're doing. So things like protection, a left over quick `exit' in
a script are all things we must consider.
> I think the fact that this command has any output at all indicates
> that all is well in that quarter:
The command above doesn't call /etc/init.d/gpm, so why should it prove
that file is okee? And the command below doesn't show whether the
start-stop-daemon call in it was commented out or not.
> root # /etc/init.d/gpm force-reload
> Stopping mouse interface server: gpm.
> Starting mouse interface server: gpm.
So we really still don't know if this file is okee, do we:)
> Its just that nothing actually happens.
yep, that's why I think you should stick to calling gpm directly and
not use /etc/init.d/gpm
--
groetjes, carel
Reply to: