Re: Woody 'problems'

[john gennard <joney@clara.co.uk>]

On Tuesday 27 August 2002 10:34, Colin Watson wrote:

[snip]
>
> Ah, that would have introduced confusion. You can't have two
> different versions of the same package installed simultaneously.
> What probably happened is that 'dpkg -l' truncated
> "xserver-common-v3" to "xserver-common" in order to fit it into
> the available screen space.
>
> You can extend the screen width used by 'dpkg -l' by setting the
> COLUMNS environment variable, like so:
>
>   COLUMNS=200 dpkg -l xserver\*
>
You are quite correct. Thank you for the commandline - this is the 
kind of knowledge I don't find in books. I've been experimenting 
with it and shall find it very useful in a number of situations.

This string started with three problems. I'm trying to establish a 
LAN (have tried before without success) with three boxes and access 
to a neighbour's LAN and his ADSL net access - I have dialup modem 
access. Putting Woody on my first box, I used the configuration 
options during the actual install. Previously I configured by hand 
as this helps me to learn and also enables me to keep notes.

As yet, I don't know if I've configured the network settings 
correctly and I find I cannot access the net through my modem.
>From early on I've used 'wvdial' as a fall back until I get
ppp and other things set up right. Wvdial didn't work either.

Yesterday I installed Woody on the second box. Can't access the 'net 
and wvdial (configured during installation) won't work either. This 
time error messages point to permissions. OK, I understand those to 
some extent, so let's have a look at 'ls -l /etc/wvdial.conf'. It 
shows something I've never seen before and certainly don't 
understand:-

Arley:/home/john# ls -l /etc/wvdial.conf
--w------T    1 root     root   209 Aug 27 14:07 /etc/wvdial.conf

checking the first box, I get:-
 
--w----r-T    1 root     root    199 Aug 22 22:39 /etc/wvdial.conf

I can reconfigure by hand and hopefully sort out my access problems
(I still have Potato on all boxes), but I'd like to know what the 'T'
signifies and why the other permissions come out as they do when I 
use the install/config approach.

I'm starting to wonder if my set of 7 CD's may be faulty in view of 
the minor problems I'm having. The installs go very smoothly so any
faults must be minor ones.

Many thanks, Colin - you frequently feed me gems of knowledge.

Regards,

john.