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Mandrake 8.0 Beta Released
Boiling rumors can now be set aside: Linux-Mandrake's 8.0 beta is ready for grabbing. Before you complain about Version
Inflation (Slackware, Red Hat and others should come out with v10 just for fun), read the fine print indicating that by using this beta version, you're surrendering your machine to the winds of time, and French aliens may come kidnap you and your data for sheer sadistic sport. That is, especially if you have a VIA Apollo Pro or KT133 Chipsets and a WD drive greater than 8.4Gb in size. So the real 8.0 isn't ready yet (that will be the time to complain about version inflation proper), but like Red Hat's Fisher, this is a nice way to experience upgrades all around the mulberry bush, including a 2.4 kernel (2.4.2, actually) without building them all yourself.
The distro is running nicely except for some crashed of the updater and a missing Flash plugin in Konqueror. The installer is a big improvement over the old one, it's the best one I've seen so far, only problem: Installation on Software RAID seems to be broken.
My personal highlights in Mandrake8 are
Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there may be no future at all for Linux because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Linux. As many of us are already aware, Linux continues to lose market share; red ink flows like a river of blood. Slackware Linux is perhaps the most in endangered. Let's look at the numbers.
MandrakeSoft's CEO Henri Poole states that there are 70000 users of Linux-Mandrake. How many users of Debian GNU/Linux are there? Let's see. The number of Linux-Mandrake versus GNU/Linux posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 70000/5 = 14000 GNU/Linux users. Slackware posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of GNU/Linux posts. Therefore there are about 7000 users of Slackware. A recent article put RedHat Linux at about 80 percent of the Linux market. Therefore there are (70000+14000+7000)*4 = 364000 RedHat Linux users. This is consistent with the number of RedHat Linux Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Corel, abysmal sales and so on, Corel Linux is going out of business and was nearly taken over by Microsoft who sell another troubled OS. Owing to the GPL, SuSE is laying off almost all of its US staff while VA Linux already has. Major marketing surveys show that Linux has steadily declined in market share. Linux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Linux is to survive at all etc). Linux continue to falter. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Linux is dead.
Ok, this is a rant and it is a bit personal, but I'm getting sick of all the i586 and i686 packages(especially those) floating around. Now I can forgive Mandrake since that's part of its bag. But why other binary distributions (like mozilla)?
I own lots of Pentia class machines, but I also have some really cool 486 machines that I'd like to use. Yes, I could get the source and recompile everything, but this is my rant and I'm going to enjoy it for a minute.
Thank you.
So goto Redhat's web site and update the damn kernel and, while you're there - grab all the updatess. It's pretty simple to run:
rpm -Uvh *
and thats it! I'm running here Redhat 7 with those updates and it didn't have even a single problem since the update of the GCC
Hetz (Heunique)
Actually, I get 10=9 not 9=10. And, by my quick analysis that is in fact the correct answer. Here's why: when the the constant expression is evaluated by the compiler, it can do a couple of tricks to come up with the "correct" answer of 10 (eq. rounding and infinte precision math (like "bc") come to mind). But the variable expression must be evaluated with floating point math, and that's where your difficulty is. 0.3 and 0.7 cannot be accurately represented in the IEEE floating point format. so the equation actually results in 2.99999999... + 6.999999999.... = 9.99999999... . In order to get an answer of 10, the other platforms you tried either (a) use a non-IEEE-standard floating point format. or (b) rounded instead of truncated when casting to an int (which I believe is nat ANSI standard C compliant behaviour).
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I've got a WDC WD153BA (15 gig 7200 RPM ATA-100 drive) and now I'm more than a little scared that my HTTP/NFS/NIS/DNS/SMTP server is going to shit the bed without warning. Is there a list of "known bad" models?
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Exactly what stability and security problems does Mandrake have? I installed Mandrake for the first time some week ago, totally wiping my old Red Hat. I've been using Linux since 93, running Slackware, Debian, Stampede, Red Hat and now Mandrake. And I must say that that the most stable distribution I've had is Mandrake till date. (RH & Slackware gave me frequent problems and X crashes and incompatibilities). It's also the one distribution easiest to secure down, at least outwards. So I would say it's not only for the desktop user.
8.0 is so much different from 7.2, that we really can't call it 7.3 (kernel, glibc, gcc...). It's even worse - LM changes so fast that it may have been more apropriate to go with +1.0 steps all the time. :-(
So what should we do? Call it LM Q1 2001 or so? LM 2001 + service packs? Complately drop numbers? Would that be more meaningfull? Would that be "better"? I really don't know.Now, linux or no linux go and buy that backup tape, CDburner, or whatever and make a nice backup of your data. All of them. Then sit down and think of a strategy how you will survive a total and unexpected destroying of your data (house on fire scenario), and start making regular incremental backups, and saving backup devices far away from your PC.
When this is done, come back and enjoy slashdot again. Peace with you.Install LM 8.0 on some old 486 machine, let it start KDE (or gnome, doesn't matter), open star office, maybe netscape too... Then go to cinema and by the time you come back some of the progs may already be ready and waiting for you...
OK, you could go for some lighter GUI, and avoid real slowware, but the sad fact is: old machines are too slow for modern GUI software. So what's the point on installing the newest disto on it?
This said, there are some places where such machines would do a perfect job:Civileme has been investigating this for quite some time, and he wrote about it on Mandrakeforum. It looks as if WD has severe QA problems, and this time it got a help from chipset and a bug (or at least lack of workaround) in kernel.
Here are the stories:- Numerical Analysis & the Walrus
- What Now? WINDisks, of course
- Is this Computer Science or Voodoo?
Civileme even claims that WD drives just fake CRC, but it's difficult to say if there is some truth in this or not. One is sure: these beasts cause a lot of trouble.IBM makes some damn fine drives...
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
Then why don't you get the Source RPM and recompile it for your system?
What in the hell are you talking about?
look, if you don't cast to int the second expression you get 10.000000. i also tried it on my alpha with both compilers, gcc & ccc (compaq) and i always get 10 = 10 irrespective of ieee compliancy for floating point and direction of rounding. because casting to an int is _NOT_ equivalent to a floor, it's implementation dependent. trust me, i checked for it last week. it's in k&r 2nd ed., somewhere in appendix c.
having a further look at this, i simplified it:
.7));
#include
int main(void) {
int a = 10;
printf("%f = %d\n", a * 0.7, (int) (a *
return 0;
}
give it a try. if you hold the result of multiplication in an intermediary variable, the result is correct. what i find interesting is that it gives incorrect results only for 0.6 and 0.7.
=)
sorry to beat the dead horse, but how you explain that this gives the correct result (with -O0)?
.7;
int main(void) {
int a = 10;
double d;
d = a *
printf("%f = %d\n", d, (int) d);
return 0;
}
i don't think so, it promotes to higher precision: d = (double)a * .7, so it gets 7.0 as expected :-)
ok, thank you for the explanations. i'm an electrical engineer, working into satellite data processing :-)
.6 ));
.6f));
but i suppose you will find mildly amusing the results of this:
int main(void){
int a = 10;
printf("%d\n", (int) (a *
printf("%d\n", (int) (a *
return 0;
}
just to finish this thread: i beleived this is a bug in gcc. being a perseverative person :-), i just downloaded lcc and give it a shot. now i'm _convinced_ :-). yep, this is a bug.
sorry, Jean-Marc. guess i badly needed this coffee 8-). i woke up now (it's 3:30am here). you are right and i always use rint(3) in fact.
:o)
i got it before & i get it again, so help me god
Mine was one of the "Caviar" 1.6 GB drive, although I don't remember the model number. Yes...quite old.
l
A quick google search pointed me toward the Linux UDMA how-to.
http://www.linux.com/howto/mini/Ultra-DMA-9.htm
The blacklist:
*Western Digital WDC AC11000H, AC22100H, AC32500H, AC33100H, AC31600H - all versions
*Western Digital WDC AC32100H revision 24.09P07
*Western Digital WDC AC23200L revision 21.10N21
...note that this is the *entire* blacklist. It seems that the other drive vendors have their acts together.
Keep in mind that these drives should run just fine as long as you *don't* enable UDMA. I was unaware of this, and that's why I got bit. Also, I'm not sure how up to date or comprehensive the list is, but atleast it provides a place to start.
Happy hacking...
--Lenny
Having a WD drive bit me pretty bad about a year ago. A week or so after a kernel recompile, I wound up with filesystem corruption, even though I was running a stable kernel. I take my computer very seriously, and though I was able to recover my important data, losing the filesystem hurt *bad*.
My faith in Linux took a big hit after that. The only explanations for that error were 1) hardware failure (seemed unlikely) or 2) serious kernel bug. I contemplated migrating to FreeBSD, but was informed that much of the IDE code between Linux and BSD is shared, so any fundamental bug would probably follow me to the new platform. So, I just rebuilt my system and carried on.
A few months later I was reading Kernel Traffic, and someone posted a filesystem corruption problem with the exact same symptoms, using the exact same WD hard drive. One of the hackers identified the source of the problem -- it was Western Digital.
Some models of WD drives are advertised as "UDMA compatible". That is, you can enable UDMA and they will run. However, WD is sidestepping the fact that the drives are *not* UDMA "compliant". Apparently a part of the UDMA spec is the transmission of periodic CRC checks to detect and correct errors. Some WD drives will operate in this mode, but blow off the CRC checks. This is suicidal. If the drive is used in UDMA mode (which it claims compatibility with) you *will* get data corruption...it's just a matter of when and how bad.
Thinking back before the failure, sure enough, I had enabled UDMA in the kernel, looking for a speedup from my UDMA "compatible" drive. WD had mislead me in the features of that drive, and it resulted in data loss. I view this as highly irresponsible on their part, and I will certainly not buy from them again.
--Lenny
Very funny! I switched from AmigaOS to Debian, and now use FreeBSD for my LAN servers and test machines (I'm building a "jail" host server even as we speak).
Good ol' Bob seems to have nailed this one on the head! :)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Before you reel off a kneejerk response I'd like you to actually go back and look at your posting history over the last few months or so. Notice how many times the va linux stock issue comes up in your posts (note also how many times you just flat out shoehorn it in whether it has anything to do with the topic at hand or not).
You are seriously disturbed, dude - a normal person just doesn't sling bile and vitriol about other peoples' misfortunes with this level of consistency and enthusiasm. I have no idea why you are the way you are - but I have once encountered people whose behavior is somewhat parallel to yours - you probably know them too, the people who gloated incessantly back in high school when someone else's relationship floundered and never missed an opportunity to heap sarcasm and cynicism on the concept of relationships in general.
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't
Applicability: Linux-Mandrake 8.0 BETA 1 WARNING This BETA has the potential to mis- recognize the drive geometry on systems with VIAApollo Pro or KT133 Chipsets and WD drives greaterthan 8.4Gb in size. This leads to massive andunrecoverable data corruption. Do NOT install or attempt to test with these systems. It relates to recently discovered kernel bug which may be fixed in kernel 2.4.2. We expect to have the fix in place for BETA 2 (Traktopel). Thank you for your patience.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Well...I'd say it's just a case of users having an overwhelming sense of pride in their distribution =)
;P )
I admit, I'm a debian convert (used Redhat for 3 years, then tried debian once - can't ever go back) but I try to be an understanding one - No distribution is "right" for everyone...debian just happenes to be "right" for me (and for quite a few other, more opinionated folks as well, it seems
I'm also not a descendant of an amiga user (never owned one - never owned anything made by commodore, although I'm in the process of acquiring an old c64 to play with).
Don't make general statements like that - it just makes us all look bad.
Other than that, nice troll =)
My Mandrake 7.2 was up 74 days until shut it down last night to upgrade the CPU. It has been plenty stable with my hardware.
I never heard anything. ??
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
This has nothing to do with ANSI C. This is how floating point numbers work. It depends on the FPU (i.e. the *hardware*) you are running on. Floating point numbers are not exact and you must never assume that 10.0 == 10.0 no matter what language you are using. For some simple cases it just may happen to work, but in general this assumption is a grave programming error.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Mandrake has 28% of the market because they were wise enough to sign up with Macmillan to be their publisher soon after Redhat was stupid enough to drop the same. If Redhat was available in KMart & Costco right now instead of Mandrake then they would be shipping that many units too. It really has nothing to do with their distro; it's more like Joe User sees that newfangled "Linux" thing while he's out shopping for groceries and picks it up because it costs 20 bucks. Not to mention that for awhile Mandrake had the same version numbers as RHAT and basically camoflauged their boxes so you couldn't tell you were buying a derivate distro and not the real thing itself.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Is there any way to convert my / to reiser while _keeping_ all data.
If you mean, how can I use reiser on / and still run lilo. Then you need to specify the "notails" option when you mount reiser (look in the documentation, it's a known thing).
If you mean how can you convert ext2 -> reiser in place, then AFAIK you can't.
ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
I saw the 8.0 Beta out of the corner of a blurred eye and coulda sworn I saw "B 0 B", instead of "8.0 Beta"
What? I was trying to do an FTP install with a little test computer I always use to try out new and breakable stuff, and it yelled at me: "52 meg of memory needed for network install, 40 detected." What's up with that?
Posted from the wireless couch.
It's related to how the x86 FPU works and how GCC uses it. You'd get the same answer on any x86 operating system using GCC, including FreeBSD and Windows 2000.
I've been toying with the idea of installing a Linux Distro. I have about 20Gb of unused drive sitting here.
But it's my bread-and-butter drive: my whole business life is on it.
I have an Asus K7V, and a big IBM drive. Apparently in that combo, Linux will eat my files. If that carried over to the Windows partitions, I'd be toast...
Think I'll keep away from Linux for a while longer. I can't afford data loss like that.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I assume that is a libc issue and not a gcc issue, since it seems gcc under *BSD does not suffer from this bug. It is still a bit disheartening however, have you notified the libc people about this?
v2sw7CUPhw5ln6pr5Pck4ma7u7LFw0m6g/l7Di5e6t5Ab6TH.
Heck, even Linus called this decision idiotic!
Why should Linus' opinion matter more than anybody else's? Is he some sort of deity for writing a kernel? Don't get me wrong, I have a linux box on (well, beside) my desk, and I have several lightweight servers running linux, but... come on.
[root@skylark /root]# cat /etc/issue.net
/root]# uname -a
/root]# uptime
/root]#
Welcome to %h
Linux Mandrake release 7.2 (Odyssey) for i586
Kernel 2.2.17-21mdk on an i686
[root@skylark
Linux skylark..org 2.2.17-21mdk #1 Thu Oct 5 13:16:08 CEST 2000 i686 unknown
[root@skylark
12:06pm up 2 days, 2:31, 1 user, load average: 1.26, 1.22, 1.18
[root@skylark
Why is my load average so high on a 900mhz with 512mb ram!
James Ray Kenney mailto:jrkenney@swbell.net
I'm a bit surprised about this comment. It mentions that you can get an easy upgrade to a 2.4.something kernel by using a Red Hat or Mandrake beta release. How about mentioning that SuSE 7.1 is released with a 2.4.1? I should think this was even easier than using a bumpy beta release.
For the record, I get the same bug with the Cygwin-experimental version of GCC 2.95.2-6
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
Simple. The RPMs are not compatible with 7.2 build. 'Cooker' junkies have know this for quite some time. That and a new kernel, new KDE, new glibc, new install process, new world domination matrix...whoops, that one is my own.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
gcc-2.96-0.35mdk
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
So you're using RedHat 4.2, 5.2, or 6.2 then? Those are the supported versions that use a "standard" compiler.
-
RedHat may still say Fisher on their web pages, but Wolverine (Beta 7.0.91) is already out, and has been for a week.
-
Mandrake Cooker has Alpha versions of our latest RPMS. The installer has not been updated since 7.1 days, but the packages are recent.
There's a similar problem with MS Access, and I suspect it's common to all OSs.
Under access a 'decimal' field has a fixed size/precision, and the API (ADO) will throw an exception if, for example, you try to put 0.4444 into a dec(1,3).
Due to floating point rounding it is impossible to put the number 0.84 (I think... could be 0.82 or something) into a decimal field. The cast to double creates 0.83999999999... which won't fit.
You actually have to cast the variant type to a true 'decimal', then hack around with the internal structures of the variant_t to reduce the number of decimal places. (very undocumented, don't try this at home folks!).
Lesson: floating point numbers are problematic. If you want accuracy use fixed point/strings and custom libraries, MP libraries or similar.
*shrug* Floating point is tricky. I would class your post as a clever troll. I think gcc, by default, is not strictly IEEE compliant.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
This is a silly reason. It's a slight different in how floating point calculations are done on the two platforms. Floating point calculations not involving powers of two are going to have some error in them. For some reason, with gcc under Linux on the x86, the error results in the second calculation giving a result very slightly less than 10. The (int) typecast does not round.
This more proves the lesson that you shouldn't expect exact results out of floating point calculations that it proves whether or not any particular OS is better than another.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I'm running Mandrake 7.2 on the firewall that I'm sending this message through. I've been a mandrake user since version 6.0.
Unless I'm tweaking or doing something weird all of my mandrake boxes are rock solid stable.
DrakConf is a big reason why I've stuck with mandrake. I don't ave to visit web pages to know which kernel module to use when I add a new piece of hardware, I find out from DrakConf and poof I put it in.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Just a tip: xargs is your friend.
ls logname.1* | xargs rm -f
Works with any size directory.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Your explanation is of course correct technically, and I apologize for this 'clever troll' as someone described it.
:)
However, consider explaining that 10 equals 9 for small values of 10 only on Linux distros out of dozens of other platforms to someone that was being tortured while doing a C assignment. Now, do you get my point? Try not to view this from an ANSI-C-bigot point of view, but from a poor-guy-trying-to-learn-C or poor-guy-assigned-to-port-stuff-to-linux view. There's plenty of bad code out there, and you know it
Anyway, just in case any of you really cared, rest assured that I don't base my OS decisions on such stuff, or I wouldn't have any linux boxes around to test this interesting bit of trivia on.
If you've got a minute, and one of those 'bleeding edge' OSes, try compiling with no optimizations and running this for fun:
int main(void)
{
int a = 60, b = 6, c = 10;
printf("%d = %d\n", (int) (((60/6)*0.3) + (10*0.7)), (int) ((( a/b)*0.3) + ( c*0.7)));
exit(1);
}
(BTW the lameness filter defies logic, that was the best I could do with the C snippet)
A friend was tortured for a few hours doing an assignment until I took a look at the code and realized the problem boiled down to something that can be reduced to this snippet.
I compiled this with default compiler settings on every platform I could find. This means Digital Unix 4.0, OpenVMS 7.2, Solaris 8, IRIX 6.4, HP-UX 10.20, FreeBSD 4-STABLE, OpenBSD 2.8 and various Linux distros, from ancient to cutting edge - both with gcc and any commercial compilers that happened to be available at each box.
On all Linux distros, and only on Linux distros, ranging from an ancient Slackware setup to the latest Red Hat, I get 9=10. On everything else, I get 10=10. Go figure, and remember that the whole OS is compiled with that.
I think I'll just stick to FreeBSD as far as my intel boxes are concerned.
But if you're going to complain about version inflation, why would you wait? At least this way they might change their minds. If you wait until 8.0 is actually released, it's a little late.
On a side note, more seriously: I know there's been a lot of joking around anf flaming, but VA Linux really is going down for the count, isn't it? The stock's dropped another 12% down to $4.41/share, and it doesn't seem to be bottoming out. I'm curious what's going to happen to Slashdot and Andover -- whether they'll just be turned loose, another company buys them, or whatever. Anyway...
Cheers,
LNUX has dropped over 40% since the market closed last Tuesday, though, while NASDAQ's only lost about 5%. Same pretty much holds true (as far as LNUX bleeding way more than the market as a whole) whether you look at the last 5 days, 10 days, whatever. Stick a fork in this company, it's done. On the bright side, ESR's original $41,000,000 worth of LNUX stock is now down to about $550,000, and his gloating sounds more comical everyday.
Cheers,
Take a look at the asm output on the systems this is failing on. Bear in mind that all powers of 10 (10, 10^2, so on) can not be properly represented in floating point (why is better left up to a more confusing discussion). What this comes down to is in the integer conversion on the left hand operation-if you look at the asm output, you will likely see something like PUSH 9 instead of PUSH 10 like you would expect. Did you have a chance test this with the same compiler versions on FreeBSD and linux on intel hardware?
This is a known issue with logrotate in 7.1. There is a fix for it:
M DK A-2000-009-1.php3?dis=7.1
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/security/2000/
I noticed this when my my CPU stayed pegged at 100% for most of the day. Not only was logrotate going crazy rotating thousands of *.gz files, but slocate was taking forever to grind through the mail and news log directories.
I used to swear by WD, but now I now longer buy them. I've just had too many problems with them, the last two I bought did the grind of death within months of being installed.
Exactly what I've switched to. You pay a bit of a premium, but it's better than the Maxtor shite at the local CompUSA.
No problem. You may just have to rm -rf news and recreate the directory. I was getting argument list too long errors when trying to rm news/*.gz.*
I run 7.1 and had problems with logrotate creating thousands upon thousands of files under /var/log/news and /var/log/mail. It was zipping the old logs and keeping 4 around named logname.x.gz where x was 1-4. Well, in those two directories, it didn't seem to understand that it shouldn't rotate it's own .gz files. I finally noticed this after probably 6 months. It took me probably a hour and a half just to delete them all... there was far too many for a simple rm logname.1* -f or something like that, had to go through and try to pick out small enough chunks to make it work. I noticed this happening because logrotate was taking 100% cpu for FAR too long.... That might be your problem, also with that many files slocate would probably take forever as well...
-Ted
These version numbering schemes are becoming ridiculous. Actually overheard in a store (Frys's Sunnyvale): "No, get that one over there, it's Linux 7.2. This one is 7.0" (referring to two distinct distros). I would hate to know what they thought of FreeBSD 4.2 or Caldera 2.3 :-)
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
> hehehe that's pretty funny, but my zip drive works fine with 2.4.2
And mine with 2.4.0
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
[applvis@home applvis]$
10 = 9
[applvis@home applvis]$ uname -a
Linux home.wseb.com 2.2.17-21mdk #1 Thu Oct 5 13:16:08 CEST 2000 i686 unknown
[applvis@home applvis]$
Damn, i guess Mandrake 7.2 is broken!
Funny this happens. I run Oracle Applications under several linux boxes. Wouldn't it suck for any business of any size to be running production erp applications to have some critical numbers off becuase of a flawed arithmatic algorythm in the standard libc libraries?
ouch
well, after reviewing the correcting posts, does linux do this under all platforms or just x86?
I was bored and tried your "test" on two of my boxes, an Alpha 4/266 and a Celeron 466 both running Debian woody, both have gcc 2.95.3 20010125 (prerelease).
The Intel box got 10=9 and the Alpha got 10=10.
--
the mount option 'conv' works for 3.5.x -> 3.6.x (or whatever the version difference between the linux 2.2 and 2.4 reiserfs patches are)
I have to agree on the ext3 thing though, I use it on my Alpha and my Sparc because reiserfs isn't (or atleast wasn't) working on either of them.
--
I second the comment about Debian on Alpha, I've been running testing on my Noritake for a while now and have had virtually no problems.
The Debian-Alpha mailing list is especially helpfull too.
--
So, can those of us who installed Cooker just update?
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
You are very, very confused as to how numbers are stored in a binary system. .9999 will not be stored with 4 digits (.9999). It will be stored as a binary mantissa and a binary exponent, not as 4 characters. The problem lies in that the mantissa can only carry so much precision. Think of it this way:
.5
.25
.75
.125
For number greater than 1:
0000 = 0
0001 = 1
0010 = 2
0011 = 3
0100 = 4
etc.
For numbers less than 1:
1000 =
0100 =
1100 =
0010 =
etc.
I'm working off of very vague memories here (10 years since I had this in class), but I believe the IA32 architecture has 80 bit floats, with some portion allocated for the mantissa and the rest for the exponent.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
If you compile gcc with -O2 you get 10=10. I guess this is because it optimises the variables to constants at compile time. This might be what the other compilers are doing.
There was some discussion of the review on mandrake's forum. What was noted there is that Helix explicitly says that their packages don't yet work with mandrake 7.2. The reviewer essentially tried to install an incompatible package, and then complained when it didn't work. That's far from what I'd call "intelligent reviewing."
-schussat
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Thanks.
That's what I fugured - I'm gonna give 8.0 a try..
Does anyone know if this bug affects WD SCSI drives, or just ATA ones?
I'm running 7.1 at home, and it seems a bit flakey - not sure why. Maybe because I'm using reiserfs?
It was OK for a while, but the slocate and logrotate cron jobs now just chunder on forever (I've now disabled them), and sometimes the system just goes into a CPU killing disk-swap downward spiral (I've got 64MB RAM, but two swap regions totalling a lot more - maybe 128MB or 256MB).
Any ideas? Anyone else have problems with 7.1 that went away with 7.2?
I think I'm gonna give 8.0 a try anyway - got a partition reserved waiting for it!
Thanks, Ted. That 100% CPU usage sounds pretty familiar!
/var/log directories when I get home?
I'll check my
BTW, off the top of your head, do you know how to configure logrotate - is there a simple way to avoid this problem (other than disabling logrotate, which is what I did)?
Same thing here - the reason I'm going to install 8.0 is because I want the 2.4.x kernel and KDE 2.1... SuSE seem pretty aggressive with keeping up too - I might give them a shot one of these days.
If I wanted a older stable version of Linux I'd go for Debian.
One thing that always amused me about Mandrake (don't know if it's still like this, I haven't used it in a while), was the "Linux By The Pound" installer. Instead of choosing packages, it just put up a slider bar, allowing you to choose how many megabytes of Linux you wanted. That just struck me as really funny for some reason.
"How much Linux would you like, sir?"
"I'm feeling pretty full, so only 213MB for me."
"And you, ma'am?"
"I'll take 800MB of Linux, thank you."
Do the words "Real Hardware" mean anything to you?
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I say that from personal experience, especially my travails this past week. It actually runs (more than I can say for Mandrake 7.1/Alpha (maybe I just have a bad CD, but it doesn't seem that way), but RH7.0/Alpha (which was the newest iso I could find) has some problems which can be fixed, but I have been looking for newer, less broken packages from an 'out of the box' kind of config...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
See, that's my problem - the install goes well (it seems), then I reboot... kernel decompresses and loads, then when init is starting, I see an error telling me that libreadline can't be found, and things grind to a screeching halt, ending with a very fun "no processes left in this runlevel message". I was planning on getting the new stuff off of Cooker as soon as I was up, but I never got so far as a login... and the installer only gives four choices for network cards, so I need to wait until my system is up to configure that (or I could go get a Tulip/3c595/PCINe2000/whatever the fourth choice is that I don't have). No big deal, but kind of a pain. Also, when the install asks for the 2nd (ext) CD, it doesn't unlock the drive... so you can't put any of those RPMS on at install time. Unless there is some (undocumented) reason why I can't load the kernel with Milo...
I haven't had much time to scour lots of places for help, but if the install is broken before I get up and running... my MD5 sum matched for the iso, too, so I haven't tried pulling that down again and reburning - it'll take a while.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Ah yes, Wintel beat Apple... but for the people who had Beta and Apple in 1985... well, you can still buy Apples (and really, the PowerPC chip is a better processor architecture than the x86... the Altivec stuff is nice, but that does limit the peak speeds of the chip).
I knew what you were getting at, but unlike Beta (which was quite a bit better, but good old corporate politics and licensing killed it), Alpha and x86 don't completely overlap in the same app space. Something about 64bit data, 64b PCI, and a much better FPU than the x86 line (and stable as hell, too). DEC dropped the ball, and Compaq hasn't pushed things as much as we'd like, but really, an 833MHZ 21264 rates 590 base/650 peak in specfp2000, while a 1.5GHz P4 rates 543/552, a 1GHZ P-III a 292/304, and a 1.2GHz Athlon 304/342. Stable, tested, available hardware (the high speed alphas have been around a lot longer than the P4 and higher speed P3s have been almost working). There are some very good uses for what I term real hardware, and there are still plenty of installations out there. Free software is one of the great ideas. GCC isn't so hot for fp performance on Alphas (something I'd like to help along), but the DEC/Compaq compiler is cheap, and running Tru64 is slick. The idea is to help Linux do what it needs to. I've got a nearly four year old low-end Alpha here (my 21164PC test box) that can still rock with the best of them
Also, by my count there are far less S/390 mainframes, AS/400s, RS/6000s, O2s, and E10ks than Wintel boxes, so I guess everyone should just give up on those too... damn Superior Technology X, Y, and Z.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I wish somebody had a current distro for Alpha. The latest I can find is RH7.0 (brokenish) or Mandrake 7.1 (won't reboot after install - can't find libreadline5). Kind of a pain for those of us running Alphas... I'd love to see a distro release with 2.4.x sometime in the near future.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
suse may end up the #1 distribution because... well, europe LOVES it... germans especially...
and, i think that suse may actually be /profitable/, even... something that is unheard of for US distribution companies...
yeh yeh... their american division got fscked... but there is more to the world than the good ole US of A...
tagline
... hi bingo
And mine with Mandrake 2.2.18
Have a Happy.
why should we?
..etc)
Heck there are lot of numbers and if it makes clear that a version is different from the previous one, use it..
I work for a company that is very tight on version numbers. So we end up releasing stuff like
XX 1.1.0.2
XX 1.1.1.1
XX 1.3.1.4
Personally I think you shouldn't go beyond 3 number versioning.
XX 1.0.0 (initial release)
XX 1.0.x (for bug fixes)
XX 1.x for minor enhancement
XX 2.0.0 (with major enhancements, change of operating environment aka needs different version of third party software
Now to Manadrake, I think going from 7.2 to 8.0 is reasonable as it says these are vastly different. Besides I would rather call it 7.x & 8.x rather than
7.1
7.2
7.3.1
blah
My uptime used to be in weeks. But now in hours, as I have to shutdown the machine when I leave home. why? b/c of the rolling blackouts!! Yes, I do have a UPS, but it cannot withstand 1-2 hour rolling blackouts! And yes I do have reiserFS but I am not willing to let my machine hard-reboot everyday willingly :-)
:-)
(BTW, I converted all my filesystems to Reiser except ROOT. Is there any way to convert my / to reiser while _keeping_ all data.)
Can you believe in Silicon Valley, we don't have reliable power?
LinuxLover
hmm, thats why linux as internet sertvers with apache is rising faster tham Microsoft and already powers twice as many websites?
try www.netcraft.com for some actua,l factual info
Juln
[..] On all Linux distros [..] I get 9=10.
Repeat after me: Floating point calculations are imprecise. It seems like you've got it the wrong way around, by the way: the calculation that is done at compile time is "exact".
You can simplify the above further to
... (int) (3 + c * 0.7)
int c = 10;
which gives you 9 -- because 0.7 happens to be rounded down in binary! (60/6) is an integer calculation, so that gives you exactly 10 -- but with floating point calculations you get rounding errors.
That the first expression, which is calculated by the compiler does result in 10, is because that is done by the optimised compiler, which calculates the whole expression in the FPU without storing intermediate results. And the i386 FPU uses 80-bit numbers internally, so that it does work out OK in this case. Or perhaps you're just plain lucky.
If you want the answer to be 10, just change int c = 10; to double c=10.0000000000001;.
When it comes to numerical mathematics, lesson one is: You cannot trust the rounding of floating point calculations.
Jeroen Nijhof
Here is a link for these who have an access to so-called "Interactive" version.
J 83 /4487.html
:-)
http://interactive.linuxjournal.com/Magazines/L
But frankly, nothing there about crashing gtk or something. It is however pointed out that it crashes some (Helix?)GNOME applets. Which is true, as far as I can tell, but only for "freshly out of box" 7.2 sold commercially. And without any patches, of course. It's beyond the scope of review to patch the product before using it
"I grew up on ( insert choice of distribution here ) , and then I grew up."
I have used Slackware 96, RedHat 5.2, and I switched to Mandrake. I thought that Mandrake 6.1 and 6.2 were okay, but then problems with 7 forced me back to RedHat.
But before we go back into a distro war here, each of the distributions does fill a niche. Slackware is nice for developers, RedHat and debian are nice for a production server due to their ease of upgradability. And mandrake... well... yes it's easier to use and setup for the home user. But a serious user will feel short-changed with stability and overal usability.
What, you think I run this box for fun? =) This is the database server for the Town Hall of a smallish (14k people) town in Massachusetts. GCC is on there because one of our vendor's programs has a component that's compiled on-site.
We've got a file server running linux now, desktops run Win9x. At home I dual boot W98 and SuSE 6.4.
--
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
# uname -a
SCO_SV hol504 3.2 5.0.5 i386
#
Reading specs from
gcc version 2.95.2 19991024 (release)
#
#
10 = 9
--
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
When mandrakesoft gets around to doing a secure-kernel version of 8.0 I hope that this time it will be able to run more than 1 Samba user at a time. In 7.1 & 7.2 the secure-kernel makes multiple users impossible with Samba.
That's my only gripe with 7.2 for now. Other than that it's pretty darn nice.
Are they trying to damp the insatiable demand of North Americans for new software? What's with the Europe-only release? Good thing the trans-Atlantic cable is watercooled.
Wah!
A) There is nothing inherently wrong with "Windows characteristics." There are bad characteristics and Windows characteristics. An item in one set is not necessarily in the other.
.0 releases, everything has beta builds. Its an essential part of a software release. The problem isn't releasing Betas, but releasing Betas and pretending they are final products.
B) What's wrong with beta builds? Linux has had beta builds ever since I can remember (except they call it a -test) RedHat beta builds have been called
C) Try Gentoo Linux It's nice and light, has a lot of the cool package management features of Debian, and is well-thought-out. It also has something like a ports tree. It might be a little cutting edge for many people's tastes (a comment once accompanied a package "package x.y.z merged. Did we beat freshmeat?" It's still a development product, but its manual installation isn't really any harder than installing some other Linux distros, and gives you a lot more control. When this thing reaches 1.0, RedHat watch out!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Actually, the PCI spec is a very expensive "open" bus. If you have ever tried to write an PCI code, you'll find that they charge several hundred dollars for the specs.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
X.10 and X.11. Can you say trademark violations?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Does anyone know a way for VMWare to boot off of ISO CD images under Windows 2000 (got to keep this around for the games!)? I like to run Mandrake Linux in a VMWare session but damn, they keep releasing a new version every month it seems. Okay, I just burned version 7.2 onto a CD and now I have to burn the 8.0 beta CDs just to try it out and throw away again? The optimum solution would be for VMWare to load those ISOs virtually as if they were actual CDROMS. But to go about this? Anyone have any ideas? Thanks.
Find and share links to celebrity profiles on MySpace! http://www.myspacecelebrities.com
Well, given that you are asked as part of the installation process what sort of function your box will provide (workstation, development, or server), I would say that your question is easily answered.
I installed the server version in high-security mode (are you listening, RedHat), and it has made a great proxy server for my home network. No un-necessary services running (in fact, by default, next to no services are running at all, they must be turned on by the sysadmin).
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
Now that one is easy.
C cast the type acording to the right side of the expresion (a*0.7) so it wil make it
d=a*(int).7 which meens a*0.
The difference between the two expressions is that one is a constant expression and can be evaluated at compile-time (as is done by cc1), while the other is a variable expression and must be done at run-time. The compiler expanded the second expression in assembly code and got (at run-time) the result $9 (due to rounding error) in the %eax register, which was then pushed onto the stack. Then it evaluated the constant expression (at compile time) and got the constant result $10, which was pushed directly onto the stack. Then the string, then the call to printf.
The discrepancy is apparently due to the floating-point code in cc1 not having the same round-off errors as the code it generates. Maybe someone over at GCC HQ should take a look.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Debian 2.2/with some woody thrown in...
/usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-linux/2.95.3/specs
bdwalton@binner:~$ gcc -v
Reading specs from
gcc version 2.95.3 20010125 (prerelease)
bdwalton@binner:~$ a.out
10 = 9
Damn!
-Ben
Say what you mean, mean what you say! But please know what #$@% you are talking about!
And it works like a charm, I haven't had any problems. What kernel version did you upgrade from? Older 2.2.x kernels didn't recognize the geometry of some drives properly, but would still work, but when switching to a new (fixed) version it would screw it up because the partition table is off (or something, was a while ago I saw this).
FYI, I have an Abit KT7-Raid and a DMA-100 30 Gig Maxtor drive, DMA-66 20 Gig Maxtor drive, and a DMA-100 45 Gig IBM drive in two different machines and they all work just fine with 2.4.x.
I wouldn't necessarily blame the kernel if a fsck won't complete, ext2 can get fucked(sorry for the profanity, saying fscked may have been confusing) pretty easily depending on what your machine is doing. You can almost always manually fix it though, but that's a pain.
Maybe you should try ReiserFS. I've been playing with it for a few days and so far so good...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I've noticed that the development version of Mandrake includes gcc 2.96. So does anybody know what version of gcc this beta is using? Despite what many people think about 2.96, I personally would like to see it in Mandrake 8.0.
...sure, 2000-8 = 1998; lots of "room" before reaching the "version bloat" red-line ! :)
And mine with 2.2.17. Chances are good the joystick works too.
I'm confused.
I use Mandrake at home, Debian at work
and am a former Amiga user.....
MSVC 6.0 SP4 on Win98se, Intel CeleronII
10=10
Press any key to continue
Anyway, it's just random FP inaccuracy as several smart people have pointed out.
dufke
-
__
Comment submitted. There will be a delay before you understand what you posted.
You're right, as far as I can tell.
On my Mandrake 7.2 system:
10 = 9
On a random AIX system:
10 = 10
Could someone please explain this?
Try not to view this from an ANSI-C-bigot point of view, but from a poor-guy-trying-to-learn-C
He's probably learnt something.
:wq
...and BTW, I tried on solarix x86 with gcc 2.95.2 and also got 10 = 9, so this is not even an OS issue. It's all about a bad programming practice that produces bad results with a certain compiler/CPU combination (using the same gcc version on solaris/SPARC gives 10=10). That's all there is to it.
If a certain program doesn't produce the same result with different compilers/platforms, the most like cause is not a bug in the compiler, but an undefined behaviour caused by a badly written program.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
However, consider explaining that 10 equals 9 for small values of 10 only on Linux distros out of dozens of other platforms to someone that was being tortured while doing a C assignment.
In case you didn't read my other comment, this have nothing to do with Linux, since I could reproduce the same thing on Solaris x86 and I'm pretty sure I'd also get that with gcc/Win32. The way your code is, luck is the most important factor is determining whether it'll work or not! Regardless of the platform (I bet you could find another similar example that would produce 10=10 on your linux setup and 10=9 on other setups).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
There's nothing strange in your example. It looks strange because in the decimal system, .7 is easy to represent. What if I asked you to compute (3 * .3333333333), you'd say .9999999999 and if I asked you (int)(.9999999999), the answer would be 0. However, when I said .3333333333, I meant 1/3, but there's no way you could have known. In (binary) float representation, .7 is a periodic number, just like 1/3 in the decimal representation. That's why you need to expect wierd (random) outputs when you compute stupid things like (int)(10 * .7).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I think you did not understand anything at all from my several posts! THIS IS NOT A BUG, it's a feature! You cannot make the assumption that such float calculation will be exact to the last digit, period. If you round to the nearest integer, you'll get the right result, all the time. But when you make such stupid assumptions, you're just asking for trouble.
.6*10 = 6.
If you want to convince me that's a bug, go look up in the C language definition and find the place where they guaranty you that these kinds of calculations has to give what you're expecting. There's simply no guaranty of that, that's all. AFAIK, the only float calculations that are required to be exact (IEEE spec or something like that) are those that involve integer numbers, like 2.0 + 3.0 = 5.0... and certainly not
I hope you get it now.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
OK, I'm not talking about "standard" code with no library calls. If you get different results for a float calculation on two different platforms, it's most likely because:
- You've got an uninitialized variable that "happened" to have a value of 0 with some compiler/platform
- A comparison between two floats (a == b), which you should never do.
- An array bounds error, which can sometimes (if you're lucky) not overwrite any useful data (but does with another compiler/platform)
- Your trying to use things (int)10*.7 in some computation...
...you get the point.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I know all that... I said that to simplify things I was going to work in decimal, although (duh!) de CPU works in binary.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The value of: (int) (((60/6)*0.3) + (10*0.7)) can be either 9 or 10, depending on when the float values are moved in/out the floating point registers (which are 80 bits instead of 64 bits for a double). Your compiler cannot guaranty the result and you should no assume that the result is 10, unless you round to the nearest integer (instead of casting to an int, which is equivalent to a floor).
Therefor, it's not the compilers fault it this problem happens, it's your fault if you make those kind of assumptions (It's the same reason why you should almost never use == when comparing 2 floating point numbers).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
OK, let's go... (with my previous 3 * .333333 example)
.333333 (6 digits in the register) in register and multiply by the 3 that's in memory. The result is .999999. When you store that in memory, it is rounded to 4 digits, giving 1.000, which when converted to int, gives 1.
.3333 (4 digits in memory), you get .999900 in the register. When you store that in memory, you get .9999, which once conterted to int gives you 0.
We'll work in decimal, so transpose this to binary for a real CPU. Let's say your "float" (as stored in memory) has 4 digits and your float registers can hold 6 digits (a double is 64 bits, a register is 80 bits).
If you load
Now, if you have 3 in the register and multiply by
The only thing that changed is what goes to register and what goes to memory. I'm not saying this is exactly what happens in your example, but it's probably something similar.
BTW, if you look at the gcc man page, there's an option called -ffloat-store which deals with registers that are larger than the memory representation of the float number.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I'm using an Asus A7V (which is KT133) and 2.4.1 with no trouble at all. I have an Ultra160 drive, as well as a few ATA66s, and they've all worked fine with 2.4.x since the day 2.4.0 came out.
This is a self-referential sig
According to the scaring Fine Print it could have been Mandrake XP as well...
This sig is stolen from someone who had a much better idea than I had.
The explanation is simple. Under Linux, the FPU control word has its precision control field set to 3: extended (80-bit) precision. Under FreeBSD and NetBSD, it's set to 2: double (64-bit) precision, same a C "double"s.
As a result, the Linux FP calculations are slightly more accurate. The constant 0.3, represented as a 64-bit C double, is slightly less than 0.3; the double constant 0.7, similarly, is slightly less than 0.7. Using 80-bit arithmetic, it's clear that (double)0.3*10 + (double)0.7*10 should be less than 10; truncated, it should be nine.
On the other hand, when all the calculations are done with 64-bit precision (as under Free/NetBSD), effectively the result is rounded after each multiply. As luck would have it, the results of the multiplies are rounded up to the exact values 3 and 7, so the sum is 10.
You can cry yourself to sleep, or you can decry various compilers, libraries, and OSes as L4M3. Alternatively, you can add:
at the top and: just before the printf and get the same answer under Linux as under all those far better operating systems and architectures you tried.I stll have it somewhere. I wonder if I could port Debian on it ... an apt-get miracle --target=vic20 could do the trick, I guess.
Ciao
----
FB
I think MDK fills a big void for the home linux user. All the bells and whistles attract the casual consumer. Sure folk who know what the need and see linux can do it, are good to go...but some folks need eye candy for encouragement.
I'm only a casual linux user. My server is always a linux box (that's just how I learned to do it), and at various times, my main box (It's not now b/c of KT133 problems). But I can honestly say that 'bleeding edge' is an attraction to me. It's not a req., but it's nice. Afterall, nobody says the server has to be all cute with KDE etc., but I kinda like playing with that stuff on my main box, or on spare boxes (my tupperware box!!!).
The cutesy in MDK is for the most part, optional. Unlike my other installed O$.
-Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
As of 7.2, it's still there. But you can also choose by the package if you're so inclined. As cheap as HDDs are, I prefer to just choose the categories of things initially (database, kde, etc). I may play with other stuff and delete it later though.
-Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Even Apple made it X...ten,but not Mac OS 10. Anyway...just thinking outloud with my finers. I'll be curious to see what Apple does on revs...
X.04 ?
X.1 ?
X.5 ?
OK...now mod me down for off-topic ramblings...
Cheers
Galego
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
a)British
and
b)Too old
Rich
I think that I'll agree with the other respondants to your comment and say that it's just bad programming practise. I'm not an expert, but what they've said made more sense.
TurboC on Win98SE gives 9=9.
oojah
Do you have any better hostages?
Funny this happens. I run Oracle Applications under several linux boxes. Wouldn't it suck for any business of any size to be running production erp applications to have some critical numbers off becuase of a flawed arithmatic algorythm in the standard libc libraries?
Firstly, as so many posts have pointed out, floating point is inexact and you can easily fall foul of rounding errors when casting to integer.
More importantly, this is why databases go to the trouble of providing DECIMAL type as part of the SQL standard. Floating point variables have 'interesting' rounding errors, and most businesses, especially those doing any sort of accounting, can't afford to lose any precision. All DECIMAL type calculation are therefore done to the limit of the precision of the type and have well-understood rounding limitations which should not manifest themselves like this.
Quite honestly, if you are using floating point numbers for any sort of simulation, doing the error analysis is a complete pain in the neck. In many respects you are better off using integer values, maybe with scaling offsets, because at least then you can control and understand all the cases where you drop precision.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
There you go... rohith@inferno test: gcc try.c -o try rohith@inferno test: ./try
10.000000 = 10.000000
Beep!
Does the word Betamax mean anything to you?
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
I will agree that this is a somewhat odd idea, but you can select individual packages. Not to mention it does a somewhat decent job picking the most important packages.
There is a Mandrake Corporate you can get now. it's supposed to be geared towards the server arena, but i haven't tried it myself....
Haven't you seen 'Mission Impossible'?
Because there is a nice specimen of French and not ugly in it (and no, it's not Jean Reno).
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
bash-2.04$ ./a.outC i386
10 = 10
bash-2.04$ uname -a
FreeBSD www.shz.com 4.1.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.1.1-RELEASE #0: Tue Sep 26 00:46:59 GMT 2000 jkh@narf.osd.bsdi.com:/usr/src/sys/compile/GENERI
Thats on a AMD k6 500....
Corporate 1.0 is based on 7.1 with a customization wizard helping you setup everything the first time you logon. Seemed pretty handy to me but I moved on to 7.2 and set it up myself.
Works for me... recompiled 2.4.1 on a KT7, with a WD 27.3GB drive...
"Let me open these blinds so the snipers can see in." - Kevin Giffhorn
I'm also having similar trouble with my setup. I've got an Abit KT7-Raid and a Western Digital 40 gig drive currently running on the raid controller. I'm running Linux 2.4.2. File corruption appears to occur mainly during heavy disk usage. I can get the error to occur reliably by compiling the X Windows source code -- every time, a few random files generated during the compile (for example, some of the makefiles built by imake) appear to have a small section of the file (maybe 15-30 characters) replaced with a corresponding set of characters copied from a location just above it in the file. I read one posting on the linux-kernel mailing list where a user (with an Asus A7V I think, but the same chipset) thought the problem was with a PCI caching system that was not getting updated appropriately; old data was being flushed to the disk from the cache. (The VIA "north bridge" chip in these motherboards has some ability to cache data passing between the CPU and the PCI.) It certainly seems to mesh with the type of corruption I'm experiencing. He reported being able to avoid the corruption by turning off caching in the BIOS. I'm going to try that as soon as I get the chance. Another Abit KT7 user I've talked to says that he's experienced no problems, but that he's using the standard IDE controller (he has the version of the motherboard without the raid controller). I may end up just taking my HD off the raid controller and putting it on the standard IDE, and see if that fixes my problems. --John
--John
Mandrake 7.2 comes with an optional 2.4 kernel. Just set "hack" as your default boot kernel.
This sig is xenon coated, and will glow red when in the presence of aliens
>their whole setup seemed rather "cutesy" to me.
:-) Been a slacker for 5 years, and I'll probably continue on it. Where did Patrick Volkerding's 386 end up anyways? Or does it still compile the slackware kernels?
That's why I can't even use Mandrake (at least v 7.2) on one of my machines. I'm was setting it up on a machine and I had two monitors at hand: 640x480 standard VGA and 1280x1024@75 Hz fixed frequency. Their graphical setup runs at 800x600 (or some other resolution that isn't standard VGA). ARGH! And their text installer just didn't install it properly. Wish I knew why.
So I tried RedHat 7.0. I got it on there, but then I find out the compiler is a joke. And I'm on a 24kbps modem connect, so ain't no way I'm spending my life downloading rpms -- I'm already at my wits end downloading 25 MB kernels!
So back to good old reliable, working, Slackware 7.1 again... ho-hum.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>VIA Technologies VT 82C586 Apollo IDE
>VIA Technologies VT 82C686 Apollo Super ACPI
That doesn't sound promising... Here's the VIA page about your chipset.
It is a Via Apollo Pro Plus. So you are warned not to install it. Better luck next beta!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Huh? Check this Linux Counter Estimate first next time.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I expect a severe backlash in face of XPs forced adherence to strict licenses, rather than what the user may think is fair.
.gz file with perhaps a setup.bin program, and where all the files just get dumped into a directory of the user's choice, and runs from there. That model is useful too.
KDE useability is just as good
Installation is pretty easy
Its only administration thats arcane and retarded still.
Even if you don't think the useability level is equal to MS yet, it is gaining on it rapidly. By the time XP hits the shelves, there's a good chance it will have a hard time justifying its purchase, compared to the distributions available then. Even if MS wins this year, it'll have a harder time wining next year, and a harder time the year after that.
Linux standards base, Red carpet, apt-rpm are all important projects, but something missing is a channel that allows closed source programs to just ship in a
Linux stability is a croc when comparing to windows.
Sure the kernel can stay up for months, but that doesn't mean a desktop user's X server stays up that long. Its just that in windows, when the gui goes down it takes down the whole machine.
... well i'm speaking for myself, but I haven't found the x desktop more stable than win98.
you might want to check out http://www.linux.nf/storage.htm
It's got instructions for ide, parallel port, and usb zip installations.
Ok, but how many system-critical programs do you know, that do floating point operations? And when using doing high-end mathematical research I suspect that you choose your Hard- and Software according for your needs ... and it won't influence Quake that much, will it?
Btw, which compiler does FreeBSD use? Not gcc? Is there another free compiler out there? I'd love to see one.
heh I've settled on mandrake as my distro of choice. However I recently setup a router box that had a tiny hard drive so i thought I'd give debian a spin. What a mistake, apt-get breaks almost immediately no matter what I do, 3 reinstalls later I was no better off. apt is a joke.
Finally I compiled up LFS, and quickly replaced debian with it - I'll take Linux From Scratch over apt-hell any day.
And if I hear one more debian user bitching and moaning because he can't apt-get some fscking perl module or other obscure software component there will be hell to pay..
debian is vastly overrated imho.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Now I can try it once more and compare to Debian.. I always end up going back to Debian though ;)
This is a bit off-topic, but why are you exiting with a value of 1? Any non-zero value indicates that an error has occurred. God, I hope you never work for me.
you think mandrake is bad, they learn from the masters.
Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 a jump of 91 versions
That's still much better than:
2000 ---> XP
or
98 ---> ME ---> XP
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Why not?
me@thisbox$ ssh mybox
Password:
me@mybox$ top
Enigma
Enigma
--
--
Actually, my understanding is that Madrake's normal convention is to go from X.1, X.2 to the next X.0. So, since they have released 7.2, it is their normal procedure that the next one will be 8.0. Frenchies, go figure.
What are you talking about? That is the Linux-Mandrake icon. Sure looks like it to me. Unless CmdrTaco pulled a fast one after reading this, think before you speak.
Very well, my apologies to joestar.
Shrug? They install what is most important for the default bundle you choose. Out of all the distros I've used, Mandrake has been the most stable and easy to use, both for Workstation and Server. With Ximian, I can then load up all the extra junk I want without chasing down broken dependencies.
I'm not sure what better way to describe it, but I just didn't care for the way they setup certain items and the entire look and feel left me somewhat annoyed. I realize things like wallpapers and icons can be changed fairly easily, and I'm certainly not knocking having multiple distros, as I do enjoy having the latest and greatest kernel/software releases included with Mandrake, but I'm just not sure who I would recommend Mandrake to. Perhaps I'm just biased because I've been using a certain other version of Linux for so long.
Compiling kernels the old fashioned way. The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
In Ada, 10.0 == 10.0
.sig
Ps: This gave me:
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted.
Reason: PLEASE DON'T USE SO MANY CAPS. USING CAPS IS LIKE YELLING!
Take off every
Ni!
They're using a whole new kernel version. I think that's enough reason to call it Mandrake 8.0.
There's an old Dell Optiplex XM 590 lying on my floor. It has a Pentium OverDrive chip inside, an Intel 430NX chipset, an S3 Vision 868 video chipset (which was pretty good back then), and 48 megs of RAM. That sounds like the perfect Linux guinea pig system.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main (void)
{
int a = 60;
int b = 6;
int c = 10;
printf("%f = %f\n", (((60/6) * 0.3) + (10 * 0.7)), (((a/b)*0.3) + (c*0.7)));
exit(0);
}
which would give 10.0000 = 9.99999 (or would it give 10.0000? I don't have a Linux box handy.)
$ uptime
6:55pm up 8 days, 18:12, 2 users, load average: 0.19, 0.23, 0.20
I went out for the week-end 10 days ago :-)
It's FUD. Look at Linux counter - you'll see that Mandrake has more users than SuSE.
thx Slashdot Editors :-)
:-)))
Latest Mandrake was 7.2, so it's quite natural to have the new one called 8.0beta! Ok, in the past they have jumped from 6.1 to 7.0 (this was the *real* version inflation), but in a still older past, they did a 5.3 after 5.2 :-) Anyway, I've tried to download the two ISOs - I've followed and contributed to the development of this new Mandrake on the Cooker-list and while there are not many extra features from Mandrake itself this time, there is Kernel 2.4 an, KDE 2.1 and Gnome/Evolution and Nautilus. So I'm very impatient to test this release candidate!
I disagree for server use: I have several machines serving thousands HTTP request per day, with MySQL database calls and Mandrake is great for that: excellent performances (i586 optimizations + SGI optimization in Apache-Extranet-Advanced-Server). And also they have the high security levels: I put the highest and have not cracker breaking my servers. That's very confortable. And really, for stability: did you test it intesivly? It's *really* not unstable. And they are very reactive with security patches.
Why is it not the Mandrake icon?
I just bought 7.2. and tried 8.0beta download. I am new to linux so I appreciate the easy install. But the sound doesn't work in either of these distrobutions. Going to their bugzilla page and doing a search on "sound", there are open bugs that go back to last october with soundblaster cards and getting them to work. I'm no rocket scientist, but they need to have a "version freeze" until they take care of all the soundcard problems.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Now that Mandrake's getting slashdotted, I'll finally be able to get www.redhat.com again.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Er, that's referring to a problem with this beta recognising WD HDDs of > 8.4GB
AFAIK there are no capacity limits. Besides, it's an OS without so much bloat, you only need the space for MP3s. So go and slag off someone else's OS.
(did I just feed the troll?)
None of them are ready as most of your average user base is not even ready to use a computer, let alone any distrobution. A lot of these users would be better off sticking with M$ windows...
When I worked those contract jobs at people's sites and homes, well they could hardly turn the darn thing on, let alone really use it.
I have heard people rant how great CUPS is on Mandrake, yet on there CUPS website either some of the most common printers were not supported outright, or you had purchase the drivers, or your colour printer could only print in b&w. Ok, this is more of a CUPS issue rather than a Mandrake.
With Mandrake (if you can get over all those stoned looking Penguins) I have gtk crash so often....SuSE too is bleeding edge, yet there's is far more stable...What gives?
I would not believe that there single distro sales, but rather combining the sales of MacMillan books too.
Is not the reason that they got flamed because it was a development snapshot, rather than a stable release?
Heck, even Linus called this decision idiotic! That says more about anything you or anyone else can say to defend that decision...And the rest of the Linux industry will now have to pay for that mistake with incompatible code that they cannot compile, or RPM's that cannot work. And how many people with 7.0 have bothered to patch it (all approx 200MB of it)? By the fact that the Ramen worm did so well really bodes ill...
But, mistakes happen...And in a few months it will be forgotten as we all move onto hopefully the GCC 3.0 base.
My post was meant to humorous too...
StarTux
So this RedHat stock really IS worth something!
Has anyone gotten the KT133 chipset working with ANY HD's? I have a Abit KT7-Raid and after compiling 2.4 I get MASSIVE drive corruption. I've tried turning DMA off and it seems to help a little but last night the ystem locked again and now it won't complete a fsck. (same as what used to happen very quickly when DMA modes was on? FYI I'm, using a maxtor DMA-100 Drive that I'd like to use on the HPT370 Controller once I solve the corruption problems.
Wow, this guy has issues. Vent it out, Baby! You can cry... its ok...
>The compiler RH ships is the CVS for the soon-to-be-released GCC 3.0 which is in feature freeze. If a feature is still "soon-to-be-released", then why put up a distro thats set up to take advantage of something that isnt there yet, thus making it unstable. >RH7.0 is the biggest boost GCC 3 could have gotten RH7.0 may be the biggest boost GCC 3 could have gotten but it was definately the biggest stumbling block RH7.0 could have gotten. Unless of course you like a broken compiler. >The only reason that stupid flamewar started... Maybe you should vent to Marc Lehman in person. Its one thing to state your ideas and facts, but slandering someone by blaming them for a flame war is far from mature or professional.
On the one hand, it's nice to see people using the old "my distro is better than yours" standby.
On the other hand, distro wars are pretty old hat now.
Anyway, good luck starting your "discussion".
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
I've installed Redhat 7.0 on a machine recently with an 81GB Maxtor. Now THAT'S porn storage!!
Kid tested, mother approved.
It's an operating system not a cartoon guys can we mature the graphics a little? I am and probably always will be a loyal debian user.
however stability doesn't really matter so much on home machines. As long as it can stay up for a couple of hours then it is good enough.
Funny, I thought that the instability of windows as a desktop OS is one of the major factors pushing people to Linux.
Three hours stability is unacceptable to me. My laptop's uptime at the moment is 27 hours.
hi warlock (george here)
okay let's take a look at this
[#4] The accuracy of the floating-point operations (+, -, *,
/) and of the library functions in <math.h> and <complex.h>
that return floating-point results is implementation
defined. The implementation may state that the accuracy is
unknown.
many people have ALREADY said that floating point is INHERENTLY unaccurate. the REASON why you get 9 = 10 or 10 = 9 is because ONE of the expressions is calculated at COMPILE time and the OTHER is done at run time and the METHOD may differ. there is NO way to represent many floating point numbers exactly on many cpus, this is why approximations are used instead. this will OCCASIONALLY lead to a rounding error. YOUR example is particularly precipitous and draconian because you use an operation (TRUNCATION) that is the most likely to show the unaccuracy!!
all in all i have to say that your criticizm is pretty PICKY. and trust me i KNOW picky, my wife is the most picky person EVER, "george keep your elbows off the table, george put the toilet seat up, george don't use the word AIN'T" god!!!!!! sorry if this is harsh but god i have to come HOME to the world's biggest grouch and there is NO REASON why this pickiness should be tolerated!! god
your bud
-gbd
I'm running mandrake 7.2, most filesystems ReiserFS, and I've tried kernels 2.4.0, 2.4.1 and 2.4.2. I also have a MSI mb equipped with one of those chipsets. There's something going wrong, but definitely NOT with hd geometry recognition (BTW it was fixed in 2.4.2, I think). I've had the auto-tuning of HDs at startup screwing something with DMA config, resulting in my 20GB Seagate disk killing the system with dma_intr errors. The solution is to shut down all "automatic" tuning and starting rc.sysinit with hdparm settings which configure the disk correctly.
I've had hdparm report the auto-config which kills the system and it's the same as the one I put (-d 1 -X66), but if I do it manually it runs fine.... go figure.
The problem I have now is that the disk is supposed to support udma4, but trying to set anything beyond udma2 results in a nice message saying it's not supported, even if looking at the source in drivers/ide/via6xxxx.c says it should go up to udma5. I've tried to force ide1=ata66 but the only difference is a warning message.... I'm clearly missing something, but since I don't need udma66 I've stopped investigating the issue...
Overall, if you're scared of developement stuff you shouldn't be running the stuff released 1 week earlier :)
This sort of unexpected rounding problem is why real calculations that can cost money or down planes is never done in hardware floating point. You write a floating point representation library that does everything with integer storage and finite precision that is controlled in the library. Then when you move from machine to machine and OS to OS you know that it's always going to behave the same way. This is what we did when I worked for a big financial market data firm. Same integer-based code on Windoze/Solaris/DEC Alpha/MVS. Limited precision is a fair trade off for known accuracy and predictability.
- Sig this!
If you want real bleeding edge go Debian sid
Just for the hell of it (yes, I'm bored), tried the win32 binary of gcc-2.95.2 with that snippet under win98SE and a K6-2 300mhz processor.
Result: 10 = 9.
Interesting. I wonder, what makes it "9 = 10" on Linux and "10 = 9" on Windows.
For anyone who simply cannot wait, I have been told that the RedHat binaries work fine with Mandrake 7.2, but don't scream at me if they don't!
-----
I though that beta distribs and high version numbers were a Windows characteristic.
... holes ... sec holes ... too much useless stuff ... Debian!
Global linux beta distribs began about 1 year ago (not sure, please correct me if the case!), but you can find a pioneer in that: RedHat produced some kind-of-betas something like 2 years ago.
I think that says a lot about the linux trend.
I can't find a distrib I completely like anymore.
... heavy
No, that's hard to install...
Vic
To all you guys who got your Zip drive to work with 2.4 (Parallel Port, right?) what did you do?
[nikopol@nikopol nikopol]$ gcc test.c -o test ./test ./test
[nikopol@nikopol nikopol]$
10 = 9
[nikopol@nikopol nikopol]$ gcc -O2 test.c -o test
[nikopol@nikopol nikopol]$
10 = 10
(Linux RH 7.0 w/updates)
but anyway i agree with all the posts i've seen about floating point operations, compilation and cast. This program looks a bit odd to me as it's pointless.....
If a home user just installs mandrake as it wants, I could see why you would see it as not being high-scale for other systems.
/mnt/iso, something newer versions don't incorporate), I very well am considering Caldera or Debian, yet, if the hardware expansion continues, I may even move to Storm, mostly because I've grown fond of the never-to-actually-be-released U1 Strike Server. I'm lightly playing with the idea of SuSE and Best, but I'm sticking with Mandrake until I say it's not worth my time anymore.
The last version I installed was 7.1. 7.1 allowed me to do lots of things 7.2 refuses. 7.2's auto-detect lacks a lot to be desired, and limits tweak-ability for root. Trying to upgrade only creates two damaged kernel-based systems.
Needless to say, I went back to 7.1 and have been adding bits and pieces, rpm by rpm, and, in some places, because it was put together by a group of people who stopped caring about the technical details of self assembly, hack by hack.
Yes, Mandrake has issues, and I have no intention of looking at 8.0 until it's fully released. If I find it to be just as sad, I'm going to switch AGAIN!
For those of you not familiar with my general what-chya-do-carizmo, I've been extending the powers of Linux since Red Hat 4.0, and then moved to Mandrake at 6.0.
Since Mandrake has been going all out to make me mad (thank linus I have
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
You can't trust floating points, but you can "tutor" the programming to come out with the apparent correct answer.
Of course, this is just a direct math problem where you already know the answer; "tutoring" something incorporated into a more extensive programme, however, can cause all sorts of unexpected problems. Ironically (don't hurt me), doing this directly in BASIC is less likely to cause problems. BASIC, though, is about as blunt as a language can get, and with non-serial linear blocks, all you ever end up with is...Alan Cox's beard.
.oO(Well, I though it was funny, and spagetti is so over used. Though, saying Cox and BASIC together feels wrong.)
Well, now that I confirmed that floating points and BASIC only cause problems, who's up for volleyball!?
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Time to upgrade from 7.0 distro.
/etc/issue.net
[mark@pacific mark]$ cat
Welcome to %h
Linux Mandrake release 7.0 (Air)
Kernel 2.2.14-15mdk on an i686
[mark@pacific mark]$ uname -a
Linux pacific 2.2.14-15mdk #3 Sun Jan 30 15:38:24 EST 2000 i686 unknown
[mark@pacific mark]$ uptime
12:45pm up 372 days, 3:37, 10 users, load average: 0.15, 0.14, 0.09
[mark@pacific mark]$
One wonders why the other distro's have so much difficulty equaling Mandrake in this arena? People like Debian and Red Hat are too purist in their respective fields to ever really become popular in the home, however as their users have accepted this it does not matter, I suppose. Still, such lack of ambition in the arena is startling.
The bleeding edge and easy to use nature of Mandrake is why it has 28% of the marketplace. More power to them, I say, and hopefully other distro's will take a leaf out of their book.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
Mandrake2001
7:08pm up 283 days, 1:41, 2 users, load average 2.23, 2.36, 2.16
This is a MySQL server handling an average of 600 queries per second.
Mandrake is very, very stable.
can you post the link for that please?
-The American people have overpaid; I am here to ask for a refund.
well there is a problem. PCI specs are public domain so one man's PCI bus is the same as the next (if they stick with the standard).
AGP however is a patent of Intel and therfore for competing vendors to use AGP they have to reverse engineer it. this process is not always (most of the time actualy) acurate and one does not therefore get the same performance from chipset to chipset. to bad intel won't open up the specs.
-The American people have overpaid; I am here to ask for a refund.
Let's see. Caldera OL 2.4: Good, stable system but a bitch to install. RH5: another stable distro that I kept around until V6.0. Good distro. RH6.2: 6.2 pissed me off because all of my kernel compiles would fail the make modules step. Mandrake 7.1: Solved my kernel compilation problems and I was fairly well satisified with it. Mandrake 7.2: Mistake! KDE 1.99 sucked butt. Got the updated GNOME and KDE packages (along with the big laundry list of other rpms) from Mandrake and tried them out. They worked fine except the the damn MenuDrake won't actually change my menus! Ugh! And what's with / needing to be 1GB? And the infamous make module problem is back... Stability has never been an issue with any of my distros. Compiling has. I prefer to use RPM for the distro specific stuff and compile third party apps like Samba, etc. RPM is nice but there needs to be alot more coordination in the building of packages. Overall, the best distro for me has been Mandrake 7.1 has has been up and running for about 37 days now.
Your world frightens and confuses me! When I order an espresso at StarBucks, I think that the foam on top is the saliva of a rabid mammoth! Sometimes when I drive my Ferrari at the racetrack on weekends, I wonder, "Are there little men inside running really, really, fast?"
My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts. But there is one thing I do know -- the 2.4 kernel still does not support my Zip Drive or USB joystick. This is really annoying to me, a primitive caveman, because I it makes it difficult to work on my flight-control systems source code from work under a familiar UNIX-style environment. Instead, I have to copy the code from my Windows machine with a working Zip drive, copy over the gigabit ethernet in my primitive, caveman home, and then copy the compiled executables back in order to test the tolerances. Even my feeble, confused mind can recognize that USB support in the 2.4 kernel is a necessity!
Thank you.
My daughter looks like that idiot Cyborg_Monkey!
You must have me mixed up with your mom.