On 18/09/2023 12:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 12:17:39 +0100
> Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote:
>
>> I can't remember if it was SCO or Xenix, I just remember being impressed
>> how quick a 386 PC was compared to minis.
>
> SCO bought Xenix from Microsoft, later the product became SCO Unix
> after the SysVR4 changes were merged into it.
>
Ah. My bad, I was thinking of Venix, not Xenix. Venix was a heap of crap
but would run on a 286...just about

Sco Unix was a damned good platform for a small company 'minicomputer'

It even had TCP/IP ... eventually!

--
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid decision or more dangerous way of
making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people
who pay no price for being wrong.”

Thomas Sowell

On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 12:14:47 +0100
Bob Latham <bob@sick-of-spam.invalid> wrote:

> I typed sudo passwd <ret>
>
> It asked for a new password x2
>
> Never asked for existing password for pi user oddly.

There's some authorisation caching in sudo, so if you have recently
given your password for a sudo command sudo remembers this and doesn't ask
again.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 18/09/2023 12:57, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 11:06:48 +0100
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On 18/09/2023 09:00, Bob Latham wrote:
>
>>> I think I understand the principle there (just), but dear me.
>>> What is dd?
>>
>> I think it stands for 'direct disk' Unix was written in the days long
>> before even a CRT terminal was common and so its commands were
>> deliberately short.
>
> It's far more obscure than that :)
>
> The dd name was a joke reference to the IBM JCL command DD (data
> definition). Originally dd was the universal data format conversion tool
> capable of converting between ASCII and EBCDIC, adjusting parity,
> converting case, swapping bytes (endian conversion) and dealing with moving
> data between block structured devices/files with different block sizes
> performing block padding as needs be.
>
> It can still do all of this (check the conv section of man dd)
> should you ever find a need to do *any* of it.
>
*shudder*. I find myself unaccountably smiling at your post. It brings
back memories of really old fashioned computer days.

--
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the
urge to rule it.”
– H. L. Mencken

On 18/09/2023 13:27, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 18/09/2023 12:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>> On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 12:17:39 +0100
>> Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote:
>>
>>> I can't remember if it was SCO or Xenix, I just remember being impressed
>>> how quick a 386 PC was compared to minis.
>>
>> SCO bought Xenix from Microsoft, later the product became SCO Unix
>> after the SysVR4 changes were merged into it.
>>
> Ah. My bad, I was thinking of Venix, not Xenix. Venix was a heap of crap
> but would run on a 286...just about
>
> Sco Unix was a damned good platform for a small company 'minicomputer'
>
> It even had TCP/IP ... eventually!
>

We had it running on one of the first 486s. Database for hospitals
around the region (St Barts)

--
Chris Elvidge, England
TEACHER IS NOT A LEPER

On 2023-09-18, Bob Latham <bob@sick-of-spam.invalid> wrote:
> I've now got passed stage 10 and looking at 11.
>
> Lots of questions now...
>
> Do I need to create a script from your text or can I just copy and
> paste line by line?

You can just copy/paste the lines. When you paste the "echo" one check
that the reported number of MB is reasonable, and that the number of
sectors being copied is bigger than the last sector shown, before
proceeding to the 'dd'

> How do I change where to put the new image?
>
> Any suggestions where to put it?
>
> Can I just copy out the image using samba with something I
> understand. :-)

The file name after the "| gzip >" is where the target image will go.
It can be any file path, so if you have external filestore mounted with
samba it can go there directly. There should be enough space on the live
SD card if you remove the tarfile first, the copy it off wherever you
need it.

> How do I delete the tarfile and where is it?

The tarfile is ~/xxx.tar.gz, you can remove it with:

# rm ~/xxx.tar.gz

"~/" is a shortcut for your "home directory". As root, this is /root,
so the file is actually /root/xxx.tar.gz. The same applies to the final
image: "~/newcard.img.gz" is /root/newcard.img.gz.

> Why did we use a tarfile, was it just to reduce the storage size?

The tarfile was used to hold a copy of the OS files while you shrunk
the parition. Think of it as zipping up the contents of a disc before
replacing it with a new one, then restoring the content from the zipfile.

Final note, I "gzip" (compress) the final image as this saves a lot of
space (8GB down to 2.3GB in my case). You'll need to uncompress it
before writing it to a new card with Win32DiskImager. 7zip can do this
on Windows, if that's how you do it. If you don't want it compressed
(and have the space), you can omit the gzip from the last command:

# dd if=/dev/sdc bs=1048576 count=${n_mb} > ~/newcard.img

To pick up on the "dd" thread, that command reads from the input file
(if=...), in blocks of 1MB (bs=...) and copies ${n_mb} blocks (count=...).
It send the output to "stdout" (nominally the terminal), but we pipe
this through gzip to compress it (| gzip", and then direct the output of
gzip to the target file (> ~/newcard.img).

--
Ian

"Tamahome!!!" - "Miaka!!!"

Chris,

> You can use (g)parted to resize the partition manually (obviously on
> another machine).

I was/am trying to evade multi-step solutions. Especially ones that cannot
be automated.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 13:27:44 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> Sco Unix was a damned good platform for a small company 'minicomputer'
>
> It even had TCP/IP ... eventually!

SCO Xenix had MICNET, a LAN based on UUCP over directly connected
serial ports. With it running you could cd .. from / and find a directory of
machines on the network. It wasn't fast or standard but it worked.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 18/09/2023 13:39, Chris Elvidge wrote:
> On 18/09/2023 13:27, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> On 18/09/2023 12:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>>> On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 12:17:39 +0100
>>> Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I can't remember if it was SCO or Xenix, I just remember being
>>>> impressed
>>>> how quick a 386 PC was compared to minis.
>>>
>>>     SCO bought Xenix from Microsoft, later the product became SCO Unix
>>> after the SysVR4 changes were merged into it.
>>>
>> Ah. My bad, I was thinking of Venix, not Xenix. Venix was a heap of
>> crap but would run on a 286...just about
>>
>> Sco Unix was a damned good platform for a small company 'minicomputer'
>>
>> It even had TCP/IP ... eventually!
>>
>
> We had it running on one of the first 486s. Database for hospitals
> around the region (St Barts)
>
>
There was a legal business that had it on a 386 running the while firm
with about 25 screens on. Cost was a few hours a day to pop tapes in the
backup. and a thousand quid support contract with the software authors .

Then a board decision to put a PC on everyone's desk at about £1500 a
DESK was made with an annual support contract of about £10,000

--
The higher up the mountainside
The greener grows the grass.
The higher up the monkey climbs
The more he shows his arse.

Traditional

On 18/09/2023 14:04, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 13:27:44 +0100
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Sco Unix was a damned good platform for a small company 'minicomputer'
>>
>> It even had TCP/IP ... eventually!
>
> SCO Xenix had MICNET, a LAN based on UUCP over directly connected
> serial ports. With it running you could cd .. from / and find a directory of
> machines on the network. It wasn't fast or standard but it worked.
>
Blimey. I missed THAT one.
UUCP was something that I spent a large part of my life installing and
setting up. It was, for a time, the only way to get "Internet" email in
the UK

--
The New Left are the people they warned you about.

On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 08:50:44 +0100, Bob Latham wrote:

> In article <ue8042$il0u$1@dont-email.me>,
> Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
>> Now you know how to mount a disk, you need to know how to find Linux
>> commands that can help you do what you want to do with the RPi. For the
>> rest of this info to work, you need to know how to login as the default
>> user AND how to log in as root:
>
>> 1 the 'man name' command shows you a page (which can be very long)
>> that tells you what 'name' does and how to use it, Name can be
>> anything from a command to a Linux system call or function.
>
>> 2 the "apropos 'text' command shows you a list of commands whose
>> manual pages have 'text' in their first line of their manual pages.
>
>> 3 Using the 'apropos' and 'man' commands is the fastest way I know
>> of of finding a standard issue Linux program that will do what you
>> need it to do and finding out how to use it,
>
>> 4 If you like reading books rather than screens, consider getting a
>> copy of "UNIX in a Nutshell" or "Linux in a Nutshell" - both are
>> concise references to the way UNIX/Linux works and how to use it.
>
>> There's also "Unix Systems Programming for SVR4" which, although
>> quite old now, is still a useful guide to writing programs and
>> applications in C.
>
> Thank you for that information. Scary stuff. I've done what I've done so
> far by googling for answers and a little experimenting. I'm neither
> clever nor an academic.
>
> I wanted to learn how to write code for tcpip comms for another
> platform, I was advised to get a book called "Unix Network Programming".
> It's a thick book and cost a lot of money. I got to about page 3 before
> I was out of my depth and beyond rescue. That's why I have not got any
> linux books.
>
First question: can you write C (or C++ or Rust, ...) already?

If not, I'd recommend the ANSI edition of "The C Programming Language" by
Kernighan and Richie (They are the authors of C).

"The Practise of Programming" by Kernighan and Pike" is also good to have:
if you're starting to program because it describes how to write well laid
out and documented C code that's easy for other programmers (including
yourself in 10 years time) to read, understand and modify. A lot of what
it says is directly applicable to other block structured languages such
as Java, Algol 60, Algol 68, Pascal and even PL/I. It may even help you to
write better programs in other languages such as Perl, Python, Fortran,
COBOL and assemblers.

And, if you find that you need tried and tested chunks of code to slot
into some project you're developing, its worth knowing about both
"Software Tools in Pascal" (Kernighan and Pike) and
"Algorithms" (Sedgewick). The latter isn't cheap, but then good books
about programming languages and algorithms seldom are. Both these provide
runnable example code written in Pascal, which is easy to transcribe
directly into C and/or Java (Personal experience) because it was written
as a teaching language for use in Computer Science courses.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

In article
<slrnugghek.vum.${send-direct-email-to-news1021-at-jusme-dot-com-if@vm46.home.jusme.com>,
Ian
<${send-direct-email-to-news1021-at-jusme-dot-com-if-you-must}@jusme.com> wrote:

[snip]

> The file name after the "| gzip >" is where the target image will
> go. It can be any file path, so if you have external filestore
> mounted with samba it can go there directly. There should be enough
> space on the live SD card if you remove the tarfile first, the copy
> it off wherever you need it.

[snip]

Thanks again to Ian and TNP and everyone who has helped me get there.
I have now managed to get through the process and I have an output
file. I need to test that file.

I strongly suspect my settings somewhere but the decompressed file
isn't dramatically smaller than the original.

Original = 3,805,184 KB
new file = 3,411,968 KB

I targeted getting down from 4GB to 3GB as more than 1GB was empty.

Cheers,

Bob.

On 2023-09-18, Bob Latham <bob@sick-of-spam.invalid> wrote:

> I strongly suspect my settings somewhere but the decompressed file
> isn't dramatically smaller than the original.
>
> Original = 3,805,184 KB
> new file = 3,411,968 KB
>
> I targeted getting down from 4GB to 3GB as more than 1GB was empty.

Well done!

If that's the compressed file size then it seems about right - there should
be the same amount of content, just now it's in a smaller container.

--
Ian

"Tamahome!!!" - "Miaka!!!"

On 2023-09-18, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 17/09/2023 18:11, Mrtn wrote:
>
>> Since the horse already left the stable, you can put all this in the
>> afterburner.
>
> What a wonderful mixed metaphor..
> I smell a rat.
> I feel it in the air.
> We must nip it in the bud...

The Heinlein novel "Starman Jones" had a character who mixed metaphors
with great aplomb. I remember sayings like "Let sleeping dogs bury
their own dead," and "Let's strike while the iron is in the fire and
let the bridges fall where they may!"

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | They offer a huge range of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | world-class vulnerabilities
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | that only Microsoft can provide.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- druck <news@druck.org.uk>

On 2023-09-18, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:

> On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 11:06:48 +0100
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On 18/09/2023 09:00, Bob Latham wrote:
>>
>>> I think I understand the principle there (just), but dear me.
>>> What is dd?
>>
>> I think it stands for 'direct disk' Unix was written in the days long
>> before even a CRT terminal was common and so its commands were
>> deliberately short.
>
> It's far more obscure than that :)
>
> The dd name was a joke reference to the IBM JCL command DD (data
> definition). Originally dd was the universal data format conversion tool
> capable of converting between ASCII and EBCDIC, adjusting parity,
> converting case, swapping bytes (endian conversion) and dealing with moving
> data between block structured devices/files with different block sizes
> performing block padding as needs be.
>
> It can still do all of this (check the conv section of man dd)
> should you ever find a need to do *any* of it.

Speaking of IBM ancestry, that sounds a bit like the IBM utility DEBE
(Does Everything But Eat), which let you do a lot of the same things
from a mainframe console. I ported a version of it to a couple of
Univac mainframes. Lots of fun.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | They offer a huge range of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | world-class vulnerabilities
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | that only Microsoft can provide.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- druck <news@druck.org.uk>

On 2023-09-18, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> LOL. Don't ever pick up a book on Philosophy. I think it was
> Wittgenstein who said 'If you have not bought a book on philosophy, got
> as far as page 3, and then immediately thrown it into a corner of the
> room. you have no aptitude for philosophy'

:-)

> I too have ceased buying Unix and linux books - the Web is by far the
> quickest way, or asking here.
>
> In general you can learn far more my grabbing 'a simple TCP/IP client
> for Linux' as source code, compiling and debugging it than a dozen books
> will teach you.

Still, if you'd really like a written reference, it's hard to go wrong
with Beej's Guide to Network Programming (https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/).
I know it filled in a lot of blanks in my head when I started programming
TCP/IP applications.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | They offer a huge range of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | world-class vulnerabilities
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | that only Microsoft can provide.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- druck <news@druck.org.uk>

On 2023-09-18, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> These days I never use man at all. If I can't remember the command
> syntax I google it and chances are someone else has documented a crib
> that does what I need it to do.
>
> Like I ripped a CD onto my server and all the song title filenames came
> with underscores instead of spaces.
>
> Try invoking 'apropos spaces' .
>
> But googling 'change underscores to spaces in linux file names' got me
> three lines of bash that simply WORKED

Nice man pages (e.g. rsync) contain a section labeled "EXAMPLES".
Too bad they're few and far between.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | They offer a huge range of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | world-class vulnerabilities
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | that only Microsoft can provide.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- druck <news@druck.org.uk>

On 18/09/2023 17:11, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2023-09-18, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> LOL. Don't ever pick up a book on Philosophy. I think it was
>> Wittgenstein who said 'If you have not bought a book on philosophy, got
>> as far as page 3, and then immediately thrown it into a corner of the
>> room. you have no aptitude for philosophy'
>
> :-)
>
>> I too have ceased buying Unix and linux books - the Web is by far the
>> quickest way, or asking here.
>>
>> In general you can learn far more my grabbing 'a simple TCP/IP client
>> for Linux' as source code, compiling and debugging it than a dozen books
>> will teach you.
>
> Still, if you'd really like a written reference, it's hard to go wrong
> with Beej's Guide to Network Programming (https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/).
> I know it filled in a lot of blanks in my head when I started programming
> TCP/IP applications.
>

The sneaking suspicion I have had all my life since I first enocountered
it, that BSD 'sockets' were a truly awful way to interact with a network
device was borne out in my attempts to get networking working on the
PICO with the LWIP library. Badly documented it may have been, but the
overall ideas were a lot easier to get to grips with.

--
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the
other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

—Soren Kierkegaard

On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 17:18:10 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> The sneaking suspicion I have had all my life since I first enocountered
> it, that BSD 'sockets' were a truly awful way to interact with a network
> device

Look into System V streams if you want to see a truly awful way to
interact with a network device.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 18/09/2023 17:34, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 17:18:10 +0100
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> The sneaking suspicion I have had all my life since I first enocountered
>> it, that BSD 'sockets' were a truly awful way to interact with a network
>> device
>
> Look into System V streams if you want to see a truly awful way to
> interact with a network device.
>
I did, once. :-)

--
Gun Control: The law that ensures that only criminals have guns.

On 18/09/2023 09:29, Ian wrote:
> If you log in as "root", or get a root shell by calling "sudo bash",
> things work as expected:

sudo -i

is quicker to type.

---druck

On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 20:35:34 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 18/09/2023 17:34, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> > On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 17:18:10 +0100
> > The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> >
> >> The sneaking suspicion I have had all my life since I first
> >> enocountered it, that BSD 'sockets' were a truly awful way to interact
> >> with a network device
> >
> > Look into System V streams if you want to see a truly awful way
> > to interact with a network device.
> >
> I did, once. :-)

I had the misfortune of using it as transport for an early
fault tolerant distributed database application. It was interesting.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

Bob Latham <bob@sick-of-spam.invalid> wrote:
> In article <650786bd@news.ausics.net>,
> Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Using Tar as suggested is one option. If you still want to use raw
>> image files where the partitioning is already done for you, then
>> what I've done for that is create a blank disk image file of the
>> size I want (using dd reading from /dev/zero), then partition that
>> and copy over the system files before writing that image to a real
>> SD card.
>
> I think I understand the principle there (just), but dear me.
> What is dd?
> What is /dev/zero is that a drive?

dd is basically the standard image file (etc.) reader/writer
program on Linux. I thought you might have been using it already,
but since reading more posts I see you were doing everything from
Windows. TNF has already described dd and /dev/zero in ample
detail.

> I'd love to do it but don't have anywhere near enough knowledge to do
> it?

The aim is just to create an empty file which some Linux
programs can then use pretending that it's a physical drive, then
when everything's set up that file's contents can be copied over to
a physical drive. The complicated part is really in copying the
system files into the empty image file first. Resizing partitions
would be easier for you.

>> I've also had success with simply creating a partition table with
>> blank space at the end of an SD card. If you just copy over as much
>> data as will fit on the smaller SD card, it should still work if
>> the partitions had all ended before the space ran out. Resizing
>> the last partition on the existing card should work too (make a
>> backup first). But doing the work on a file instead of a real card
>> is probably safer and less confusing. Faster too, especially if
>> you create it in /tmp so the write operations all happen in RAM,
>> provided you have enough.
>
> No idea how to create a partition table. Wouldn't know where to start.
>
> Thanks for trying to help me but you're way above my level.

Resizing the last parition isn't difficult in a program like
GParted (which will need to run on Linux). What might be confusing
then is that your disk imager program will probably still create an
image file that's too big to fit on smaller SD cards. The image
_can_ still work on smaller cards because the data in the
unpartitioned section at the end of the image file is now ignored
in use anyway, but you'll have to convince your image file writer
program to just write as much data as will fit. That might be
easy or it might be impossible, depending on the program.

The last time I used image file writers on Windows was for floppy
disk images, so I'm not sure whether modern ones are suitable for
this. With dd you can use the "bs" and "count" options to stop it
reading/writing data from/to the image file at the end of the last
partition (if you get your maths right to work out where that is in
bytes and divide that by the "bs" value in bytes to use for the
"count" value - this is one of dd's less convenient aspects).

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> The first time we got a SUN server equipped with system V unix, and
> discovered that LPR had gone, and we have no way to make it print to its
> parallel port, was such a nightmare for the company that I drove into
> town at lunchtime, and went to the university bookstore and paid ?55 for
> a book on SUNS unix V, because it had one line of about 300 characters
> in it which was 'how you enable printing on a system V Unix parallel port'
>
> Today we have CUPS which hides all the ugliness.

Wow, I gave up on CUPS a few years ago when they changed things and
I couldn't find any documentation on the web to explain how to make
it work the way I had it before. Now I'm using lprng, which is also
faster, although I'll admit that I'd have to check the docs again
to remember how to set up a new printer.

Maybe it's all a secret effort to bring about the paperless society
by force? :)

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

On 18/09/2023 20:54, druck wrote:
> On 18/09/2023 09:29, Ian wrote:
>> If you log in as "root", or get a root shell by calling "sudo bash",
>> things work as expected:
>
> sudo -i
>
> is quicker to type.
>
> ---druck
>
su - is even quicker

--
The New Left are the people they warned you about.

In article <6508d35c@news.ausics.net>,
Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

> dd is basically the standard image file (etc.) reader/writer
> program on Linux. I thought you might have been using it already,
> but since reading more posts I see you were doing everything from
> Windows.

Yes, windows to you but I'm in the Black Country so it's Winders
around here. :-)

[snip]

> Resizing the last parition isn't difficult in a program like
> GParted (which will need to run on Linux).

[snip]

Thanks for the useful and educational post.

Cheers,

Bob.