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Re: unexpected script output

Except that I must be root to do that, it does not hurt me, so I did
not investigate further.


Give sudo a try.
I will do. But I will also find how to only give me su rights for stuff like network&power, not for everything, becoming su for system administration reminds me to take care when my username is root (or did I checked the uid? I do not remember) : the username in the prompt is in red, while green usually. I do not know why debian disable colors by default, they can be quite useful, and make terminals easier to use. 


Of course, I still do not really understand the "root access needed
on your physical computer" but using light workarounds is ok for
me... for now.


I didn't understand these words.  But I feel there is an important
question waiting to get out of them.
Well, some features are needed root access to be used. For some of them, I perfectly understand why, and I do not even want to do workarounds: it would be stupid. (Not that I'm not, but not enough for some things :) )
Some examples are power management tools, like "poweroff"/"pm-hibernate &co". I understand why it is useful on a server with ssh connection, but having no alternative for desktop use as single-user computers sounds strange for me. I still does not know if it is a limitation forced by kernel, or if it is an artificial limitation from those tools, which will only accept to be ran "if(0==uid)".
For now, using workarounds which does not involve tools remaining in background like dbus is fine for me, but it is highly probable that one day, I will find the will to look at source code where is the limitation, and patch it myself, for my own usage (and maybe share the patch if someone is interested, of course, but anyway I need to make it before :D )
In my opinion, those rights problems for basic actions on your own are one of the most annoying problems when people wants light environment they can tweak themselves with small and readable configuration files (small and readable excludes bloatwares using xml. sudo is an good enough workaround for me and for now.).
But it is not an important question, since most people are perfectly happy with policykit and sudo stuff. 


Ouch!  Well.  Perhaps it is time to start shopping for a more sturdy
machine?  Some hardware seems to last forever.  Others develop
problems and must be fixed or replaced.
I know the exact problem: my hard disk is "floating" a little, causing those HD disconnections when the computer moves a little. That's not constructor fault, only my own :) Using some basic tricks like putting some non-conductor stuff in holes would fix the problem quite fast, or simply use my electronics knowledge to use this computer in some robotics (with components fixed directly, not by using actual plastic "stuff") are my favorite options :) 
I'm just waiting money for the second...


You need a new device.
Well, I also have some reliable desktop computers, so I do not really mind if this one dies. While it does not make me looses hours of work, but this is not a realistic problem, since I often send my work on a git elsewere every time I did some good progress in autorealm source code. 


I have seen it do this when
sitting on the table untouched and unmoving.  I need to shop and
replace it. But it does this infrequently, once a month or so, and so 
hasn't been an urgent enough problem to do yet.
Maybe you have some unwanted electronic connection because some dust of dunnowhat is somewhere? Try to simply open your hardware and clean it, before buying new, it could save you some money... Just taking some precautions like studying images on the Internet to know where are small f****** fragile plastic plots to avoid destroying them when removing plastic things will be enough. 
I did not did that study :)


I do keep important data on my laptop so I do need to protect it with
data encryption.  But most importantly then I don't need to worry
about *if* I have something there. If my laptop is stolen and it were 
not encrypted then I would need to be very concerned about what
happened to be stored there.  It is difficult to be completely
disiplined about everything you do on the computer 100% of the time.
Even simple things like browser history is problematic. I think it is easier to implement the security of encryption at the system level and 
then I know it adds that layer even if I make a mistake at another.
I prefer steganography instead of cryptography. If one day I want to use cryptography to secure some data, there will probably be some steganographic techniques used before, since it's harder to find data than to decrypt them. Decrypting is just a matter of time and computer power, unlike finding them. Now, just imagine the combination...
For now, just knowing that at least 95% percent of people could not use my computer makes me thinking that data is hidden enough. If someone wants to read my data, he will need to at least know what linux is. 
Then, he have 2 solutions:
_ finding how to use my computer by himself, which will need some habits of tiling window managers, because there are no visual hints about how to run an application. Also, my hard disk being a floating one, the rogue could think that just nothing works correctly. I just would like to see someone try to enter the password, if he does not know login and its lack of '*' showing :D _ moving the hard disk into another, with support for ext4. The man will need to know what is ext4, and how to move a hard disk from a computer to another.
Honestly, if someone steal my computer and is able to do those things, he will be able to brute-force any encrypted data. The only difference will be time. I think that the man which would do that should have a good reason, not only stealing a hardware I bought 200€ 3 years ago.
Encryption, speaking about time, is only useful if secured data is time dependent. People always rely only on that, and I'm probably one of rare persons thinking that encryption is crappy if you never change your password or with data with high value. Do not trust encryption is what I would say to people, but, before that, I want to say simply "does not trust your full-featured OS" it is a hard enough progress to do for me :) (see recent Ubuntu's problems, and I've also read that gnome have also a tool which store most of your actions in a DataBase... did not checked truth, of course, since I have no use for gnome) 


Simply some source codes, which are available on a web repo of mine
in LGPL... stole it if you want :D


Sure.  Upload your software to the world and let them back it up for
you.  :-)
Your phrase reminds me about the song "open source" from "magic mushrooms", which I discovered some days ago... but I have no idea why :)
It isn't a trick. Using xinit, or the startx helper script around it, is the traditional way to start X. The xdm/gdm/kdm/lightdm tools came 
later.
I'm a young linux user. I knows about linux's existence since less that 10 years, and only started to use my own installation 4-5 years ago (if I except my failure with Debian potato, which I successfully installed the first time, but without X server. Useless to say that I was lost, even with the MS-DOS command-line strong knowledge I had at that time, I was not able to guess how to have help. So, I retried, and never get Debian installed again :D things have been strongly improved since then, thanks you contributors, you allowed me to use that nice system which is currently mine! The fun point here is that I choosed Debian at that time because of it's reputation to be hard to install xD ) . I started seriously using and tweaking it 3 years ago, when I bought my eeepc, because I had no working computers and thought that is would be impossible to play, so my last activities possible would be things I was able to do with linux... so here came the big jump: the fate decided that windows is not for me. And I agree with it.
So, I'm used to default installations of OS's with KDE, gnome, xfce, and the "tools" coming with them: gdm or kdm. Learning about how to remove those tools takes me some times, and my searches finished on a archlinux or gentoo forum, to learn some lines to copy/paste in a hidden file in your home directory. Yes, nowadays, using .profile to automatically start xinit sounds tricky.
Hopefully, many people will think it is a trick in future: it would mean that many people became linux users :) and we could have better support for wifi and video drivers... Well, I think for last one, nouveau team is making some great work, but wifi are not as limited in architectures as graphic cards. 


The Asus Eee PC 1015 pem does have the blue Fn+Fx keys such as Fn+F1
for suspend-sleep.  But I can't guess at what the Fn+F3 icon or Fn+F9
icon are for. But Fn+F1 shows a sleep icon for suspending it. (shrug) 

Oh, right, I forgot those keys... but here, those does not work:
_ F1
_ F3 (used to enable/disable touchpad. I now does this with a script, bindind to a key since the Fn key refuses to work...) 
_ F4 (no idea what's its use anyway)
_ F7
_ F8 (obviously, it needs the DE to bind it with a tool, but how the DE does this? It's mysterious for me...) 
_ F9 (same as you, what's the use?)
_ F10-12 => my sounds does not work (this is why I opened my laptop some times ago and probably did bad things with my HD :) but I'm too curious, I was not able to resist to learn how it is made inside portable computers, and it is my first one :D (bought for a "small" price, to help while I was not able to repair my desktops. Now, it is my favorite computer, even if if is a little slower to compile and vim have some freezes when it tries to save things on hard disk automatically... grumbl) so, obviously, they do not work too (and I removed alsa, so it really can't work) but they were used to work perfectly at start.
I know how to implement each one of those keys, with scripts (except for luminosity stuff and F4/F9 for which I do not know the use) but I only know how to bind keys in my window manager. I've no clue about how to do the binding with acpi, this is why I want to learn how acpi really works. 


Those do seem to be often changing and therefore immature systems.
And also quite complex and getting heavier all of the time.  A lot of
people have strong opinions against dbus.  I haven't decided yet
myself but it annoys me that emacs requires dbus and therefore my
servers have it installed.
Happy to know I'm not the only to think it's useless to build tools which have just no real use, and are a pain in the ... to understand and tweak for newcomers as I.
I just wonder why big DEs uses technologies if they are often changing... this must be a lot of work to continuously adapt themselves! Dbus constant dependencies is also one of reasons which makes me thinking about switching to a source distro. Maybe I could just have same stuff but without it. (Seriously, I only have it for browser's sounds! A bus to what? To void?) 


For me it becomes actively bad when I must take action to disable it
because it is doing something bad automatically.
You said "actively bad", so it means you think there is a "passively bad" :) 


But I have no "sleep" file in /proc/acpi? And, of course, can not
create one, since /proc is not a real file system, AFAIK...


Then you don't have the kernel functionality enabled.  I forget what
it takes to enable it off the top of my head and lack time to research 
it.  But if you had the kernel functionality enabled then it would
automatically appear in /proc for it.
I promised myself to learn what role have which kernel modules in high priority on my todo list, so I guess I might be able to do so in 2013 :) 


According to images available on the web it is Fn+F1. :-)
And images on the web are true, it just never worked, even when I was using XFCE4.8 or 4.10 (I used both). So I'm not surprised to see it does not works with my "homemade DE" :D 


I'm not. I'm already using it and it does not solve all my problems.
Also, I've always dirty stuff coming on my TTYs. Not very important
since I rarely use them, but annoying anyway, because sometimes I
uses them. And I do not think that spawning stupid messages ("acpid:
client ... had disconnected" is an example, and happens each time I
move from X11 to TTYs...) is really useful for anyone.


The syslog daemon by default will log messages to the Linux console.
The Linux console is configurable to log only messages of important
messages but *by default* Debian does not configure it.  Red Hat by
comparison always does configure it by default. But you can configure 
it in Debian too.
Oh, so, this is the syslog daemon... but I have no syslog daemon (you might think that I'm mad, but, honestly, I am not able to distinct anything in all text, so I do not read it, so I do not use it, so I removed it.) 


 Here are some notes from my firewall start script:

Hum... the firewall on linux computers is iptables, am I right?
Do you have some tool to make it easier to configure/understand, or only the man file? 


  dmesg -n5
Sounds like it solved my annoying message, thanks! Just need to decide where I should put this line now :) 


Almost exactly the same as on my Atom system.  Not too bad.  Pretty
reasonable for the hardware.
I bet that the results would differ strongly if we were using KDE or Gnome :D Just for fun: installing task-KDE-desktop would require more than 330 packages and near 690M of HD space. 
Gnome would be near 380 packages for 630M on HD.
My current system is made from 915 packages, some games included.
Do not you think that it become a joke when installing a DE is near doubling your installed softwares?
I really think making the DE contribute for the performances when I see such results.
I also think I could probably gain few seconds if I learn new things about kernel, boot sequence and hardware drivers, but not too many: BIOS already takes a big amount of time when we speak about %.
And when we say that this hardware is not very good... not entirely wrong, but, IIRC, most people were doing the same thing with their computers 15 years ago: internet messaging, playing videos and music, do some strange text with various colors, bold&underlined&italic texts, and computers were sometimes faster to do them than now, when network was not involved (I'm speaking about normal usages on normal computers). The question is: how did we manage to make such a high number of softwares bloatwares, for the sake of "user accessibility" (now, ask to anyone who does not know a specific DE and wait for his reaction when he have to use it... ease of use, really? I do not think software interactions make things easier.) 


(but this one is not
secure, only one char... I would like to completely remove it, but
ssh sounds to need one...)
And this is why I think the sudo NOPASSWD configuration for you is the 
best suggestion for you. :-)
Of course, but only for operation which does not imply security risks on a desktop, as changing the connected network or changing state power :) 


I'm not really jealous about your performances, you see :)


It seems identical to my Atom system.


Well... but you're cheating, you're also using a homemade DE :D
I think using softwares which do not do what we do not want are more important than strong hardware. Did you ever tried eclipse? I can not imagine it running on computer with 1GB RAM, 5400 tr/min and "slow" atoms (well... slow... sounds like I've always compiled stuff on proc with around 1.6GHz, at least, now, it have 64b instruction set and 4 threads (but only 2 cores)). Sounds like people just ignore that the major performance problem on computers is hard-disk... a lightweight software will not be faster because it have less instructions to execute, but because it needs less data from the very slow hard disk. SSH HD are faster, but still slower than ram, and have a capacity problem for bloatware users. 


But, well, I've 20.312 with hibernation and 04.495 with suspend... I
must admit that it's faster :)
BIOS is taking something like 10s on that netbook.


The BIOS takes about 10 seconds on every one of my computer systems.
And of course RAM must be initialized before used somewhere and
systems with a lot of ram will need more time to initialize it.  But
more ram is still better overwall.
Hum... IIRC old computers, RAM was not really initialized, but checked for errors? Not sure if they still does it nowadays, since I have not enough time to see the related numbers. 
Maybe BIOS is multi-threaded now? :D (joke)


But doing similar things at boot time
using scripts such as depending upon AC or not is easy too.
true, scripts can check various information checks, and so can be smarter. 


Well, of course, you can not edit stuff at boot time...


Which is the best feature of grub1.  And grub2 also allows it in a
much less friendly manor.


Is not it the only unique feature of grub? :)
I surely like it, but when I become unable to configure the software, sometimes I prefer to abandon a nice/fun but rarely used feature like this one and being able anew to know my system. 


but you does not have to protect it with passwords to forbid root
access without password, too, and that feature is not really used on
a daily basis.  And it's worth for people using hibernation like you
;)


If you have physical access to boot the computer then you can always
boot rescue media and become root on the system.  (Unless the disk is
encrypted.)
Unless there is a password on BIOS. I know that password can be removed easily (I did it when I was a child, my parents did not known about the connector used to reset BIOS hehehe but, obviously, they known that the password had been removed so... :S nice time :)) 


>But it doesn't hurt to let it run

Of course. But ssh, which was an example, then vsftpd, then alsa
(sometimes I want calm), then a webserver, then... ends-up by taking
more than one second. Sometimes, there are also games which starts
servers at boot-time (!).


Death by 10,000 paper-cuts! :-)
I wonder if dbus the heavy stone would loose against that kind of paper :D However, you know how fast is the hard-disk of eeepc, don't you? It is able to freeze for 3-4 seconds when vim decides to write data in his own files, so imagine when softwares are swapping and de-swapping constantly!
vim is boring me, it does too much. Nano does not do enough, and I've found no X text editor doing exacly what I need, without grabbing half the gnome desktop on my computer. And I did not worked so hard to remove them to let a stupid text editor with poor syntax coloration sending them back here! My solution is to take some time and write my own :) it will take many time anyway, and I bet 99.99% of people will not like it. I just do not care. 


I will not security as an excuse for me, because my password is very
lightweight and I do not use encryption, but the more things you
have running, the more risks you have to have problems, so, for
normal users, enabling ssh daemon only when needed is not stupid.


If your password is a single letter then sshd running on the public
wan is very scary.  Don't do it.  In your case, disable sshd.  Or
firewall it to disable it.
Currently, I sometimes use ssh on internet. But with a strong password, plus the computers identifications. The weak password is only here for LANs, and even on LAN where I do not know all computers, ssh is disabled. The worst situation is when I'm at home, because I'm using ssh with my poor passwords through wifi. But, this home is not in a city, here, there are more cows than humans :) And knowing the age of my neighborhood, I've a strong doubt they could be able to crack the wpa-key, then identify the protocol ssh to crack it also.
It is still a security hole, but an attacker will have to spy my habits at home to learn how to use it, and will not even become able to be root, because the password for it is strong. Hey, I protect important things: root access :) I mostly protect it against my own mistakes... Rogues can come here, if they have time to loose... Oh, I forget: except for few websites, cookies are rejected or cleaned at browser's end. Except for uzbl, but I do not use it for important things, it is still not enough developed to be used as a daily tool. And I must configure it, too, to use it daily :P I asked a centralized tool to configure vim, uzbl and i3 for Christmas, but did not had it :'( 


>I personally would prefer the scripted approach with suspend-to-ram
>over the runlevel approach.

This is an idea too. So I wonder if someone still have uses for
runlevels? Is there is a real difference between runlevels and
scripts?


There is no effective difference.  Runlevels is just the way the
original systems used to decide what to start at boot time. Something simple was needed because init should be kept simple. Using runlevels 
was a simple concept and easy to implement and so it is used.  But in
the end there is no difference of result doing it that way or
scripting it another way.

Bob
Sounds like the feature is not used by many peoples... between the runlevels which can only change at boot or with root access, and scripts which have those possibilities but also the cron, acpi and auto-checking stuff at runtimetime, sounds like runlevels are quite useless to me.
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