Compilation of Linux problems and their solutions

The first part of these pages contain a repository of many strange problems I encoutered during 12 years of using (Slackware) Linux and - more important - the ways in which I solved them.

The second part are my personal hints for compiling many packages from source without cluttering the main system. I store everything in a NFS mountable directory /opt and everything should run on a remote an unmodified system just by mounting or copying the application to /opt on a server.

Problems section

  1. IWL3945 wireless driver fails to associate with Access point, while the older IPW3945 worked fine
  2. stripepsthumbs.c : strip binary headers and footers from an eps file

    Nowadays most LaTeX users convert their eps images to pdf and use pdflatex to directly generate a PDF file from the LaTeX source. However, many EPS files contain binary garbage (thumbnails) at the begin and the end (notably the ones generated on MS-Windows and/or using Adobe "Professional"). This garbage causes EPSTOPDF and others to fail or generate wrong pdf output. I couldn't find any program to strip this rubbish from the EPS, so I decided to write my own.

    Simply download the source from above, compile it using "gcc -Wall -o stripepsthumbs stripepsthumbs.c" and run it on your eps files to produce a clean output : "stripepsthumbs figure.eps fixedfigured.eps"

  3. Since I run kernel 2.6.20 on my NFS client it always mounts remote NFS filesystems read-only, no matter whatever I specify in /etc/fstab.
  4. After shrinking the MS-XP partition and installing Linux MS-XP crashes with some awkward and meaningless message about "AUTOCHK program not found" and then simply reboots.
  5. Font sizes changed and refresh rates for CRT monitors are lower than specified in ModeLine after installing Nvidia driver 8756.
  6. CUPS problem "client-error-forbidden" : caused by error in firewall rules for NAT.
  7. How to change the default action for plugins inside Firefox to use e.g. your own applications.
  8. Open Office 2.0 problem with stylemanager and KDE : it seems impossible to modify any style using the right mouse.
  9. Serial ATA disks can not be checked for hardware problems with the standard smartctl tools under Linux as these only support Paralle IDE disks. However, with a kernel patch this works also fine for SATA disks.

Compile packages section

  1. How to compile Gnumeric under Slackware 10.2 without having to install a fullblown Gnome package.

Install Linux on some unwilling laptops :-)

  1. Some hints to install Linux on a Toshiba A110 178 laptop.
  2. Some hints to install Linux on a Dell Latitude D620 laptop.