Newbie questions

[Ray Strode]

> 1)  RH PPP Dialer (RP3).  I have a history of getting slow connections
> on my provider, on RH 7.0 I used wvdial because the RH GUI version
> didn't work for me at all.  ANyway, I want to be able to see what my
> connection speed is.  Also, I have problems disconnecting sometimes, is
> there some place I can cat a command to shutdown.  I don't know my
> 'hangup' command but I can find it.
I've not done any dialup in linux before, but IIRC, hangup for modems is
+++
so you could try 
# cat "+++" > /dev/ttySn
where n is a number from 0 to 3 that is the com port of your modem.

> 2)  cdrecord.  Burned my CD beautifully, but when I left my newly burnt
> CD in cdrom1 and tried to look into it, all Hell broke loose. My system
> slowed way down, and all of my GNOME icons went gray.  When I tried to
> reboot my shutdown sequence hung.  It flashed some message about SCSI (I
> am using IDE-ATAPI CD-ROM) that I couldn't quite read over and over. 
> When I manually powered down and restarted I had no GNOME icons (CLI
> still worked) and all kinds of errors listed on an alternate tty
> relating to GTK errors.  Evidently, it's OK with me calling my IDE
> CD-ROM a SCSI for writing, but after that it looks for a SCSI device for
> reading and unmounting and can't find it (that's my guess).  Eventually
> I just re-installed the system to fix it.  Looking at the cd through
> CDROM0 worked fine.
That is very odd behavior.  You should be able to treat your cdr-drive just as if
it is a scsi device.  Very wierd.

> 3)  When I used to work on Sun SPARCs we had a terminal like program
> titled 'Console'.  It was output only, no input, but it listed every
> error that occurred on the system (CLI or GUI based).  On Linux I rarely
> get error messages on my GUI stuff unless I brought it up on CLI through
> xterm.  Can I get a similar thing on RH 7.1?  
There is a program called roottail, which will basically run tail on the log files
or your choice and put them on the root window (or maybe it puts them on
decorationless windows that are direct children of the root window, i don't
remember).

> 4)  My KDE menu seems mostly bunk, my default is GNOME and the KDE menu
> seems broken.  If I guess right about the program name I can bring it up
> fine through the xterm.
kde uses UTF-8 for the .desktop file format (actually it's a decided standard between
GNOME and KDE), but GNOME doesn't use it yet.  It's possible that this could be
why things aren't working, although that doesn't make much sense, because if that were
true the menu wouldn't work for anyone at all, and I think someone out there woulda
noticed :-).  gmenu might be able to help, I'm not sure.

--Ray