Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

While trying to figure out how the mail menu works (so that my dyslexic 
roommate can make up his own method of sending mail) I noticed that the 
two programs which froze up have similar lines in them - mail and Xsetup.  
In BL2, mail script was different.  In BL3 it includes a line

echo -e " (\033[1m1\033[m]" 
(and similar lines with 1m2 1m3 etc.)

Xsetup includes the line
echo -e "to run it again, execute \033[1mXsetup\033[m"

When I try to type 1 (or 2, or Q) in the mail menu nothing happens.
When I try to type letters A B or C in Xsetup menu nothing happens.

The problem happens after the script executes Echo -e " (\033[1m......  
and any other text, before asking the user to enter some character, which
cannot actually be entered.  Since it is not very reproducible I don't
know how to test.  Maybe it is something to do with the Intel P54C popad
bug listed in dmesg?  What does \033[1m etc. do?



On Fri, 26 Mar 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:
> > > > > BL3-2 still had the non-working Xsetup menu on the first boot.
> > > > 
> > > > How is it not working?
> > > 
> > > No matter what key I pressed nothing showed up on the screen 
> > > and nothing happened.  
> > 
> > I find that very hard to understand.  Xsetup is just an ordinary
> > script.  Are you perhaps using your goofy keyboard?  Or a
> > monochrome monitor?  Or have you modified (or added to) BL3 
> > in any way?
> 
> no no no - this happened on 2 computers, both with Intel P54C cpus and 
> popad bug but nothing else in common.  AT keyboard, color monitor when 
> booting the first time on the second computer, only happened the FIRST 
> time we used BL3 so nothing had been modified.
> 
> > 
> > Where exactly is the script freezing?  Does it ask you what
> > screen resolution you want and give you three choices?
> 
> yes, but then nothing happens when you press a key, any key.  I think we 
> got out of it with Ctrl-c but the menu choices did nothing, even after 
> pressing Enter.  Nothing appeared on the screen, nothing happened.  
> On the second boot it all worked.  But now the mail menu problem has 
> recurred, on the first of these computers.  Menu worked for a while, then 
> stopped working at all, but when we switched to a second terminal it 
> worked, and continued to be frozen on the first terminal.  
> 
> I am currently using BL2, can't check BL3 right now.
> 
> That computer may have a flakey modem - it disconnected me twice 
> yesterday.  Another time it would not dial until I rebooted and gave some 
> AT commands with Kermit first.  Would that affect the mail menu?
> 
> It also has a screwy partition table:
> 
> Partition Table for /dev/hda
> 
>             First    Last
>  # Type     Sector   Sector   Offset  Length   Filesystem Type (ID)   Flags
> -- ------- -------- --------- ------ --------- ---------------------- 
> ---------
>  2 Primary        0  1270079      63  1270080  Linux native (83)      None 
> (00)
>    Pri/Log  1270080  1270142*      0       63* Free Space             None 
> (00)
>  1 Primary  1270143* 2544191       0  1274049* Win95 FAT32 (0B)       Boot 
> (80)
> 
> Partition Table for /dev/hdb
> 
>             First    Last
>  # Type     Sector   Sector   Offset  Length   Filesystem Type (ID)   Flags
> -- ------- -------- --------- ------ --------- ---------------------- 
> ---------
>    Pri/Log        0      659       0#     660  Free Space             None 
> (00)
>  1 Primary      660   666599       0   665940  FAT16 (06)             Boot 
> (80)
> 
> 
> 
> FATAL ERROR:  Bad sigrature on partition table.
> 
> 
> I don't know if this ERROR refer to our second drive hdb (used for DOS).
> 
> Notice that Win95/FAT32 is Primary 1 but is physically second, on hda1.
> What is this 'free space' about?
> 
> Jim thinks he partitioned with Partition Magic but his memory is not to be 
> trusted and he usually uses DR-DOS.
> 
> The other computer which had the Xsetup freeze has DR-DOS.
> Should I check with fdisk?
> 
> The two without problems are MS-DOS 6.22 (need to reboot to use Xvesa, 
> F5) and Win98 DOS with partitions numbered more normally. - hda1 FAT32  
> hda2 FAT16 hda3 linux, listed in that order.
> 
> 
> DOS settings can clearly affect SVGA and XVesa behavior.  But how would 
> they prevent pressing a key from selecting a menu item, in addition to not 
> displaying the result of the keypress?
> 
> In future we will try to partition all computers with PQMagic and make
> sure the results look more normal before installing DR-DOS and linux.  I
> have four computers to be set up - two Intel one AMD one Cyrix.
> 
> 
> Today I am trying to compile BMV - bitmap viewer for ghostscript, SVGAlib
> - with help.  This will give me one less reason to use X.  The author
> explains that some computers just won't handle X, because of too low
> memory (this was in 1995).  Would you be interested in setting up a BL4
> with SVGAlib and no X, and links2?  Maybe it would work on some laptops
> that can't handle X? You could include vga=ask, resizecons, screen, zgv,
> maybe gs with just one font, bmv.  Without Xvesa, you might not need the
> later kernel or pppd.  Links2-static worked without installing svgalib but
> at lower resolution (800 instead of 1024 on our S3 Trio64) and I needed to
> make my own vgalib.config for the mouse selection.  SVGAlib (or links?)
> has built-in Cyrillic.  The later links2 from delilinux requires the three
> libraries (jpeg tiff png) but is about 4M smaller executable.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux
>