Some more questions

tortoise

2007-07-06 07:03:14 UTC

Post by Michael and Nicole Freeman
Hi!
I'm still pretty new to PPC Linux (I use Debian Etch), but I'm really
enjoying it! However, there are a few little annoyances that I need some
help with.
1. I've tried all the PDF viewers I can find (XPDF, KPDF, GhostView, and
Evince), and have run into a problem that seems to be common to all of

try gv. its basic but it might substitute fonts. also I like gnusteps
pdf viewer (also known as vindaloo) although it might suffer the
same problems.

make sure you have enough fonts installed to cover most cases.
not all the fonts get installed by default. although gnustep does
not have all the postscript functionality of macosX, it has some
font management parts, which is why I suggest it.

also there is a choice of postscript interpreters so you might
want to try switching. once place i had to create a symbolic link
by hand when i did that or else the system could not find the
intrepreter.

check with aptitude about which recommended and suggested packages you
might find helpful.

Post by Michael and Nicole Freeman
them. If the PDF file uses a font that is not on the system and isn't
embedded in the file, the text using that font is not displayed. This
results in many files having large blank sections, or even being
completely blank. I've tried the same files on MacOS, Windows, and even
the i386 Linux versions of the same programs I've tried on my PPC Linux
machine, and they display just fine. Does anyone have any ideas what I
can check on to solve this problem?

if you find that a resolution or not you might want to file a bug
report. it is possible that something is broke on ppc, perhaps
or not something simple.

Post by Michael and Nicole Freeman
2. I have a USB flash drive that until the last few days has been
working just fine. Suddenly, and only on Linux (both PPC Linux at home
and i386 Linux at work), the files on it are all locked (read-only), and
I cannot write to it. It says I do not have proper permissions to write
to it, even though when I check, it indeed does have the same owner and
group permissions as my current user account. I cannot even write to it
under my root account. I cannot make any changes whatsoever to it
without Linux giving me the permissions message. Now, when using MacOS
and Windows, I can use the USB flash drive just fine without any
restrictions, and this restricted access under Linux has only happened
over the last few days. I haven't done anything out of the ordinary with
it. Has this happened to anyone else? Any solutions?

I would copy the files to my hd in macos and then reformat the
flash drive. I would try two partitions and in linux reformat one
as a linux partition. linux will allow you to check for bad spots,
but i think only for linux partitions ???)

See if it happens again and exactly what you were last doing when
it does.

I have been told that sometimes flash media has defects. it is
not a problem really for what most people do in windows or macos,
just an odd bit somewhere but perhaps linux is more finicky ?
I don't use these but i use a card reader for backup that is
supposedly the same type of media. i have no problems but
i do reformat the card fairly regular (every time i use it with my
camera, which i don't use much. but obviously the camera is not
happy about strange files...)

Post by Michael and Nicole Freeman
3. I've installed Debian Etch i386 Linux at work. On both the wired-in
and wireless network, internet access is quite slow and most sites don't
respond at all while some respond relatively well (just slow). LAN
access seems fine. This problem doesn't exist on the Windows machines
there. Any ideas?

just a wild guess, could some windows machine be playing dns
server, that your linux box is going to. not a really server maybe
a caching server. i don't use i386/windows at all so this really
is about all i could say here.

Post by Michael and Nicole Freeman
Thanks in advance for your comments on any of these issues!
Mike Freeman
mike [at] freeman-studio [dot] com