From: purdon@cons1.mit.edu (James Purdon) Subject: A question about missing fonts, man pages, and system v.s. user time Date: 15 Mar 1993 18:43:18 GMT
Abstract (for those with no time to waste):
0. Linux is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
1. Is there a man page for fsck, or is my file system hopelessly
screwed up?
2. Ditto for fonts used by olwm.
3. Can linux fsk on boot, and would this be a Good Thing?
4. Does floating point emulation rack up user or system CPU time.
Body (for those with the time):
Hi,
I've recently installed SLS distribution 99p14 on a FastMicro
"cheapie" (25 Mhz 486sx, 4Mb RAM, 80Mb Conner IDE drive, TVGA9000 card
with 512k, 1.4Mb floppy drive, all for U.S. $999 - I had to add a
MouseSystems mouse ). The installation was fairly painless (except
for a little glitch in the FAQ about how much disk was needed (which has
been rectified in the latest release, I see). I'm now convinced that
linux is the greatest thing since sliced bread, all my friends and
neighbors turn green with envy seeing me run monochrome X11, and if I
weren't already married, I bet girls would be trying to pick me up too.
Anyway, attempting to gain back some space I went on a rampage
with "sysinstall -remove", gleefully removing innocent newsreaders,
assorted editors, silly scripting launguages/tools, etc. When I
was done I noticed that mount and unmount were missing - oops.
Well, I hadn't removed them or any packages that should have
included them, but I shutdown, rebooted with the A1 - A2 disks, mounted
my hard disk and put them back, no problem. Then the infamous blizzard
of 93 struck. All the lights went out, including, as you may have
guessed, the lights on my PC.
No problem. Reboot from the A1 - A2 disks, and try a fsck.
Fsck didn't say anything. Odd. So I mounted the hard disk, and looked
around in the man pages and didn't find a man page for fsck. I looked
int the installed directory, and didn't find that an entry for a man
page for fsck (although I did find one for something like exfsck, and
whose options seemed to work nicely, when used with fsck). Should
there be a man page for fsck?
Having suffered through the horror of suddenly missing files,
I've started to worry about other things. For example, do to extreme
lameness on my part while configuring the X11 drive, I foolishly did
a couple of reboots to recover from a gibberish screen (rather than
use the CNTRL-ALT-F(1-8) sequence. While the system came up without
trouble, and the file system seemed intact, I've had problems due to
missing fonts when trying to start olwm ( in fact, the only way I've
gotten to work, though lamely, is to redefine the fonts (I say lamely
because the only font I can ever remember is fixed)). I suppose I'll
try to reinstall X11 and see if they magically appear.
Certain other Unix's do an automatic fsck when coming back from
a crash (and can fsck a mounted root file system as well). Perhaps
(if possible) this would be a Good Thing for linux? It would certainly
help my blood pressure.
Finally, I compiled my favorite application under gcc and
after a short debugging session involving floats, doubles and sscanf,
it was up and running (far better results than under Turbo C++ on MSDOS,
where my application either locks up the machine or causes it to reboot,
due no doubt to Turbo C++'s utter lameness in recognizing pointers
(why else would it make me put '&' in front of a pointer?)). 13 hours
later it was done, and /usr/bin/time tells me of that 13 hours only
20 minutes was user CPU time. Now, I didn't notice a lot of paging
(I almost wrote swapping :)) and free indicates that most of what was
going on as it was running fit into memory. Could it be use of the
floating point emulator that racked up the enormous system time?
Answer me or not, as you wish.
-- JimOnce I was single. Now I am married.