/dev/chat

Faheem Mitha

07:16

@JeffSchaller So, what happened to the printer? Just stopped working? And did you need to repair it during its 20 year life span? And were you able to get cartridges for 20 years?

@JeffSchaller Around what year were you writing this C-based code for exams?

@AndrasDeak HP makes good printers, though before they were even better. But I think they're a bit overpriced. In recent years I've been using Brother. My current Laser printer is a Brother. I think I purchased it in 2014. They make good printers too.

Inkjets make no sense. The cartridges are insanely expensive, and they apparently don't last very long. I don't think I've ever actually owned one, so this is not first hand.

I had a color Brother laserjet which I left in the US. I'm not sure color laserjets make sense, either. Too much overhead. Black and white is simple.

Faheem Mitha

09:01

@JeffSchaller TeX is actually very good for doing the kind of thing you described above. I.e. generating form letters with minor variations. And with LuaTeX is became even better.

Because it's now easier to loop and so forth.

EnthusiastiC

10:00

how to print out Linux distribution as non root user?

terdon

10:49

@EnthusiastiC no 100% portable way. Your best bet is to first try:

cat /etc/os-release

76

Q: How can I reliably get the operating system's name?

Say I am logged into a remote system, how can I know what it's running? On most modern Linuxes (Linuces?), you have the lsb_release command: $ lsb_release -ic Distributor ID: LinuxMint Codename: debian Which as far as I can tell just gives the same info as /etc/lsb-release. What if t...

Faheem Mitha

11:19

@EnthusiastiC Try lsb_release -a. Not guaranteed to work, of course.

Andras Deak

11:30

Yet again I'm planning to install a virtual windows with virtualbox for terrible reasons. This suggests that on bullseye I need to add the "Debian Fast Track" repo. Any reason why I should avoid doing this?

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha it was long enough ago that I don't remember exactly. I suspect, thanks to your questions, that the toner cartridge was running low, in combination with not using it for ~15 years, that I probably scooped it up in a household purge cycle. I never had to repair it, and I ... might have gotten a second cartridge, but it's also possible that I only ever had the one. Didn't do much printing between "my school" and "kids' school"

@FaheemMitha The math test work was 20-30 years ago; I'd have to do math to get more precise ;) I ... don't know if LaTeX tools were available on the mainframe at the time (or now), and ... I don't know if the printers were capable of postscript or not. I didn't get to see them, but the (boxes!) of printouts I picked up were from a dot-matrix printer.

Faheem Mitha

12:00

@JeffSchaller It sounds like that was an impressive printer you had.

Jeff Schaller

Hopefully they still make 'em like that.

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller TeX is quite portable by design. And 30 years ago was 1991, when (I think) Postscript printers probably existed, but were expensive. Though I'm fuzzy on the timeline. I know that when they were new technology they were incredibly expensive.

That was a VAX? I used those in Bombay in the early 1990s, but nowhere else.

Stephen Kitt

@JeffSchaller yup, but they’re big: xerox.com/en-us/digital-printing/digital-presses/…

Jeff Schaller

@StephenKitt I think we got two threads crossed; I think Faheem was responding to my personal laserjet, but we're also talking about the high-speed line printer

Stephen Kitt

@JeffSchaller I was joking about an impressive printer ;-)

Faheem Mitha

12:04

I think VAX quickly became obsolete at the beginning of the 1990s.

Jeff Schaller

at 120ppm, I suspect "request pricing" is AKA for "if you have to ask, you can't afford it"

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller Yes, we were talking about Jeff's laserjet that lasted 20 years.

Jeff Schaller

I'd probably need new electric service to run it, too

Faheem Mitha

@StephenKitt I think that's basically a printing press in electronic form.

Stephen Kitt

@JeffSchaller yup. The university I studied at had several (well, similar equipment a quarter of a century ago), they were already insane back then — upload a PostScript file, wait a few minutes, pick up your bound glossy magazine...

Jeff Schaller

12:06

yes, 240V AC and 50 or 60 amps. Weight: 3,027 lb (1,373 kg)

Stephen Kitt

Designed for Europe!

Faheem Mitha

That's some machine.

Andras Deak

when the designers misread the power specs an think that "50 or 60 Hz" means current

Jeff Schaller

A previous job had their own bill-printing equipment. I mean, bill printing and folding and stuffing and stamping and sorting. That was an impressive floor of equipment.

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller Sounds like you've had varied job experience.

Jeff Schaller

12:10

@FaheemMitha been fortunate enough to find interesting work, yep!

Andras Deak

hopefully not in the "may you live in interesting times" sense

Jeff Schaller

heh I was just going to say, "and not the Chinese curse kind"

Faheem Mitha

These days, we all live in interesting times.

And they could get more interesting.

I have the impression that these days HP and Brother make comparable printers (they might even be made by the same people), but Brother is somewhat cheaper. And also their toner is cheaper.

But it's hard to confirm any of this properly without doing a great deal of research. And one cannot research everything.

@JeffSchaller Very nice answer on the "getting to know you thread", in case I didn't already say that.

Stephen Kitt

12:27

@JeffSchaller I’ve seen regular office laser printers with letter-folding attachments, they’re quite nifty

terdon

@StephenKitt Do you have any more ideas why the two tools could report so radically different numbers of inodes?

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha thanks! It was a nice trip down memory lane when I wrote it :)

Stephen Kitt

@terdon no, but I haven’t given it any thought ;-)

terdon

fair enough. It's just gotten me curious. We normally have one inode per file, right? Even with hardlinks, they're pointing to the same inode.

Stephen Kitt

@terdon yup, that’s it

Stephen Kitt

12:55

Hey @JeffSchaller when we were talking about long-distance races recently, the bicycle race I was thinking about but couldn’t remember was transcontinental.cc

the 2019 race went from Burgas in Bulgaria to Brest in France, and was won in just over ten days (for a 4,000km route)

route choice is up to each contestant, there are only four checkpoints (usually mountain passes, to ensure that each racer has to contend with some significant climbs)

Jeff Schaller

@StephenKitt a choose your own adventure bike race?!? neat!

lol; I asked Google Maps to chart it, and it won't let me pick the bicycle option!!

terdon

@StephenKitt then I can't for the life of me think of why df and du would report different values by orders of magnitude!

Stephen Kitt

@terdon they take very different approaches to do their jobs, presumably the difference lies there — df just reports information returned by statfs, whereas df sums the stat results for each file

Jeff Schaller

FAQ: Riders will need to submit details of next of kin for emergency contact. Transcontinental will send all next of kin a copy of the rider agreement to make sure they know that the rider knows what they have signed up for.

terdon

13:19

@StephenKitt hmmm

EnthusiastiC

15:48

It worked but among the distributions I know this seems strange for me.
cat /etc/os-release
LSB Version: :core-4.0-amd64:core-4.0-noarch:graphics-4.0-amd64:graphics-4.0-noarch:printing-4.0-amd64:printing-4.0-noarch
Distributor ID: bullxServer
Description: bullx Linux Server release 6.3 (V1)
Release: 6.3
Codename: V1

it responds with
cat: /etc/os-release: No such file or directory

Faheem Mitha

@EnthusiastiC Nobody asked this, but what is your use case here? Are you trying to use it in a script, or just check the distribution version, or something else?

EnthusiastiC

16:07

@FaheemMitha just to know the distribution of this server

but it turns out that wget failed to download files,
`wget: unable to resolve host address “copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org”`

and that's the point of the whole problem that led me to check for os details

I couldn't edit /etc/resolv.conf either

terdon

@EnthusiastiC I don't see how that's possible: you show the output right above this message. But anyway, please read the link I gave you where various methods are suggested as well as the limitations of each.

EnthusiastiC

@terdon I'm mistaken, the output is a result of this command lsb_release -a instead of cat /etc/os-release

Jeff Schaller

I don't know where the "bullx" part came from (lsb_release outout?) but googling that comes up with a collaboration between bullx and SUSE: suse.com/news/… -- so perhaps you have some custom distribution. If there's not a system administrator around, then it sounds like you need to stop pursuing the OS release and focus on how to solve the DNS resolution issue.

All the google hits looked old to me, and there's no match for "bullx" here at U&L, so it seems you're in a bit of a niche.

seeing hints of a supercomputer makes me wonder if DNS resolution is intentionally disabled (along the lines of protecting the compute from the wide wooly internet)

Faheem Mitha

@EnthusiastiC What was the "whole problem" again? Perhaps I haven't been paying attention.

Stephen Kitt

Yes, supercomputers are unusual fodder in general ;-). This particular version might be based on RHEL rather than SUSE; see spec.org/accel/results/res2016q1/accel-20160104-00062.html

Faheem Mitha

16:18

It would be fun if supercomputers has superpowers, but mostly they're just computers.

EnthusiastiC

@JeffSchaller Exactly, and that's what I'm trying to resolve DNS issue

Jeff Schaller

I hope they have a super printer to go along with that thing :)

EnthusiastiC

@FaheemMitha DNS resolution is most probably disabled

Faheem Mitha

@EnthusiastiC This is some remote machine? Or a cluster?

EnthusiastiC

@FaheemMitha I would call it a cluster but I'm not sure. I use it for large numerical calculation

Faheem Mitha

16:22

Speaking of site improvements, and the like, just got an upvote on this after a long time. Feel free to upvote too.

23

Q: Using the chat reply function without pinging

If you use the reply function in chat, it currently does two things. It links your message to an earlier message. It pings the person who wrote the message you are linking to. In some cases, it can be useful to decouple these two. Specifically, one might want to link to someone elses message ...

feature-request chat

I think it would be a useful feature.

@EnthusiastiC You were trying to use DNS resolution to download something?

EnthusiastiC

yes, trying to upgrade glibc and libstdc

Faheem Mitha

@EnthusiastiC Eek! What, on the cluster?

EnthusiastiC

it worked on an other remote machine, however, from time to time it goes offline

Faheem Mitha

I don't follow. What goes offline?

EnthusiastiC

hence, I use an alternative which is this one we discussing now.

@FaheemMitha I connect to two remote machines.

Stephen Kitt

16:26

Isn’t there an administrator who knows how to do whatever it is you’re trying to do?

EnthusiastiC

Honestly, I didn't try to contact the administrator

Faheem Mitha

@EnthusiastiC Still not following. But if you trying to do upgrades on the cluster, it sounds like it won't end well, since it doesn't sound like you are the cluster admin. And I still have no idea why you would want to do that.

EnthusiastiC

I'll check their website

Faheem Mitha

Upgrade requests for machines like that need to go through "official" channels. Also, I don't suppose you have root on the machine, anyway.

Stephen Kitt

@EnthusiastiC I suspect they might not be too pleased if you end up changing the installed libraries...

Faheem Mitha

16:28

No pressure on those upvotes. But that's a request it would be nice to get a bit more attention for.

EnthusiastiC

@StephenKitt Me too. At least, they should resolve DNS issue

Faheem Mitha

I've often thought how useful it would be, if it existed.

EnthusiastiC

this server seems useless

Neither it gets updated nor it lets users to wget to download for themselves

at least creating virtual envs

Faheem Mitha

@EnthusiastiC If you want upgrades, you need to request it. What's the distribution?

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha RHEL 6.4 apparently

EnthusiastiC

16:32

@FaheemMitha somekind of Redhat

Faheem Mitha

@StephenKitt Oh, that's really old.

Ask them to upgrade to a newer RHEL?

It never hurts to ask. Sometimes you might get results.

EnthusiastiC

:)|(

Faheem Mitha

I'm not familiar with how RHEL is used, but is it normal to still have something in active use that was originally released 10 years ago?

Stability is all well and good, but that seems to be carrying it to extremes.

EnthusiastiC

Idk, people may use it for small tasks which don't require new versions of programs; except me I prefer using modern tools

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha RHEL 6 itself is still supported until 2024. I don’t know what support Bull provide for bullx; presumably if the cluster is still running, given the type of system it is, it is still supported.

Faheem Mitha

16:38

@StephenKitt I don't know what Bull or bullx is, but perhaps it's a special purpose machine.

So they don't need to keep everything up to date.

EnthusiastiC

@FaheemMitha why it should be a special machine

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha Faheem, meet search engines; search engines, meet Faheem: support.bull.com/ols/product/platforms/hw-extremcomp

Faheem Mitha

@StephenKitt Sorry, didn't bother to do a search for bull, since it seemed unlikely to give a result.

Apparently I was wrong.

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha right, bull is unlikely to get anything useful, but bullx gets you there ;-)

These are the kind of systems that many large companies and government organisations like to buy.

A bit like IBM mainframes...

tripleee

16:58

I edited unix.stackexchange.com/questions/672050/… to avoid using a valid domain but Terdon replaced it with another valid domain and now my second moderator flag just sits there since 10 hours back ... what should I do?

to briefly recap, I used [email protected] in the .example TLD specifically to avoid adding some innocent third party to the address lists of spammers, but the updated question now uses a .com domain (presumably again innocent bystander) which again has exactly the problem I wanted to avoid

I can edit the question and the answer of course but reverting a moderator's edit is not something I am going to do without somebody's blessing ... and I still can't fix the comment which is what I flagged in the first place to have that fixed by a mod

@terdon ^ are you here?

Jeff Schaller

maybe terdon thought it should be correcthorsebatterystaple.example? :)

I happen to be a moderator, so I can help -- catching up to you...

I don't see an unhandled flag out there, but that's OK; you have eyeballs on it.

@tripleee I give you my blessing to revert the edit (and update your Answer, I assume); I can delete the comments since it appears you've solved it.

tripleee

thanks!

Jeff Schaller

ping me if you'd rather I made them; might just take me a few minutes (longer) and delayed; either way!

tripleee

rolled back and flagged the comment as no longer useful

Jeff Schaller

17:14

handled!

tripleee

yay, thanks for the quick reply

@EnthusiastiC based on what you told me over in the Bash room on SO, you are really deep in an XY Problem here. You don't want to run VS Code on a cluster server, you want to submit jobs for numerical analysis to run in batch mode from a machine where you have the conveniences you require to create the job

upgrading glibc without upgrading everything is not going to work -- you basically risk breaking every dynamically-linked binary on the system if you pull the rug underneath them

EnthusiastiC

@tripleee why should I "pull the rug underneath them'?

tripleee

@EnthusiastiC replacing a library they depend on with a potentially incompatible version

terdon

Oh, hey @tripleee. I edited to use @example.com, which is supposed to be the standard example and mentioned in some white paper or other. Was that wrong?

tripleee

@terdon you replaced it with anotherexample.com which has no such protection

EnthusiastiC

17:20

what 'everything' should suppose to expand to?

terdon

@tripleee Well yes, but that's because I'm an idiot. Sigh. Sorry!

tripleee

@EnthusiastiC replace Red Hat 6 with a newer OS

@terdon no worries, all good now

EnthusiastiC

@tripleee I cannot replace it without root privileges.

tripleee

@EnthusiastiC even if you could, you shouldn't. Again, you are trying to solve problem X by solving the unrelated problem Y and just confusing yourself and us

see also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

EnthusiastiC

@tripleee I really didn't get what you meant by 'confusing you and me'.

tripleee

17:23

read the wikipedia link

and for background, the reason important applications run on very old and very stable OS versions is that they are important; everybody agrees that it would be convenient for other things to have a newer OS but having a stable environment for one or more important applications trump that; use a different system if you don't want that stability

EnthusiastiC

@tripleee I don't know if you did notice that I'm done with my issue.

tripleee

I'm just trying to clarify the points in the discussion above

terdon

17:53

Can some of you please have a look at this answer and vote as you feel appropriate? I had completely misunderstood it and made a bit of an ass of myself in the comments and I fear I may have taken some other users along because of the (wrong) comments. I'd like some more eyeballs on it to remove any bad blood I may have caused.

0

A: Moving /var onto different disk/partition

You can use a bind mount to access the original device. This does assume that the new /var is on a different partition. mountpoint /var # confirm that /var is mounted on a different partition mkdir /mnt/root mount --bind / /mnt/root ls -lid /var /mnt/root/var # these will be different inodes...

I am not asking for upvotes, by the way. Just votes: whatever you feel is appropriate.

Jeff Schaller

@terdon it seems like the comments are all cleaned up? I don't have the brain power to understand the question, but it seems like the question's comments are trying to get some useful information.

terdon

@JeffSchaller Yeah, the question's unclear. But I was pontificating about how the answer I linked to above would delete the contents of /var, having missed that /var is now a different partition so the bind mount would bring in any contents of the /var dir on the original file system. You can see the details, and the answer author's patient rebuttal of my stupid objections here: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/130295/…

Jeff Schaller

18:11

@terdon I'm generally happy to help, but I cannot right now. Maybe someone smarter or with more spare cycles can; sorry!

ilkkachu

I want to downvote the comments there.

terdon

18:36

@JeffSchaller oh, good grief, don't worry about it! I just felt I may have caused ONE undeserved downvote, so I wanted more eyeballs. No pressure!

Andras Deak

19:34

@AndrasDeak in case this was keeping up anyone at night: I managed to get qemu working, and installed windows 10 in it. Only 6 hours after starting my labour has born fruit: turns out that the PDF export of a browser page from windows looks exactly the same as from my debian, rendering all my effort pointless.

Faheem Mitha

19:49

@AndrasDeak I feel there might have been some purpose to think, but I'm not sure I should ask.

I once set up a VB MS Windows image to see if the Windows default software my scanner was using was better than the free options (it got good press). It wasn't. It was decidedly worse, and much less flexible.

think -> this (first line). Sorry.

Andras Deak

20:09

@FaheemMitha I certainly didn't do it for my own amusement :P

Faheem Mitha

@AndrasDeak Someone else's amusement, then?

Note that VirtualBox is probably less work. And MS provides ready-to-go images for anyone misguided enough to want to use Windows.

Andras Deak

@FaheemMitha in a way, yes. The interim financial report for my postdoc grant ends with me having to print the report and sign it (and have some important people sign it). My people are very serious about signed sheets of paper. The online administration system lets one "print" a report by opening a popup with some simple HTML that one can print from the browser... except it always looks like shit when I export it.

Last year I ended up logging in to the administrative system on the local admin lady's computer to get it over with. Obviously not my preferred course of action, so I tried installing windows, assuming that this would fix the pdf generation.

Faheem Mitha

@AndrasDeak I take it the assumption was wrong, then?

@AndrasDeak This sounds quite familiar, somehow. They love signed sheets of paper here too. In fact, bureaucrats here love paper forms. The more, the merrier. Especially if it's impossible to understand.

Andras Deak

@FaheemMitha apparently so

Faheem Mitha

There is this unfortunate but popular delusion that Windows is an operating system.

Andras Deak

20:19

Can you explain why it isn't?

Faheem Mitha

@AndrasDeak Not if it isn't already obvious to you.

Andras Deak

I loathe windows and today's experience has confirmed after 10+ years that I still don't want anything to do with it, along with anything else MS has to offer. But this doesn't mean that it's not an OS, or one that's suitable for a lot of people who don't care if something is limiting and shit as long as it Just Works^TM.

Jeff Schaller

@AndrasDeak not pointless -- you did Science and confirmed that the problem wasn't on the Debian side

Andras Deak

I could have spent 2-3 hours on some other kind of Science :'(

Jeff Schaller

financial reports tend to bubble up in importance; sorry!

ilkkachu

20:37

eh? Wikipedia definition: "An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs." Jargon File definition: "The foundation software of a machine; that which schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user between applications."

Which part of those do you think Windows is missing?

Michael Homer

I suppose you could make the argument that Hyper-V is strictly the operating system for most modern Windows installations

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