Questions, many many questions

[Duane Attaway]

On Mon, 11 Nov 2002, darkweb4 at totalmail.com wrote:

> - i have a Quad boot system (win98/win2k/mandrake/slackware)...and
> somewhere around daylights saving time, my mandrake cloack got to be
> about 6hr. ahead of everything else.  i've tried resetting it, but doing
> that screws up the windows clock...and the bios clock.  I've also just
> reset the CMOS clock through the bios settings, but that doesn't seem to
> fix the Linux clock!  what can i do about this other than just wipin the
> drive and reloading everything?

For the slackware setup, this may be your file:

/etc/sysconfig/clock

In my gentoo system it is a symbolic link:

/etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago

hwclock is the utility that adjusts the bios hardware clock.  You can use 
the --hctosys option to set the system time from the hardware clock or the 
--systohc to set the hardware clock to the current system time.

> - when i first (months ago) loaded mandrake onto my system, when i
> logged out of my WM, imandrake returned me to a nice little login/logout
> screen, and if i asked it to halt/reboot from this screen, i could tell
> it to reboot to any of my LILO entries.  How do i do this through the
> CLI?

/sbin/reboot
/sbin/halt

lots of other basic fun system utilities in the /sbin directory.  The 
basic user utilities are in the /bin directory.  More advanced utilities 
can be found by prefixing /usr with those two.

> - when i tell mandrake to halt, it halts, and then powers down the
> system.  when i tell slackware to halt, it halts, and then tells me that
> i have to manually power down.  what is the advantage to the way that
> slackware does this?  how can i make slackware behave as mandrake does
> in this situation, or vice versa?

This would be a kernel compile option that deals with the apm features of 
your chipset.  If you don't have the apm options compiled, the power 
management features of your bios will not be called to shut the system 
down.

> - also when i started out with mandrake, the nice little login screen
> allowed me to determine what WM i wanted to use...but i st mandrake to
> NOT start X when i booted up.  is there some way from the CLI, when i
> issue the 'startx' command, that i can tell X what WM i want to use?

You may find the wm startup scripts in your home directory as .xinitrc or 
.Xclients.

> - there is a win32 app that i found on Sourceforge, named Burn to the
> Brim (BTTB).  what it does is take a user selected directory and parse
> the files into smaller subdirectries that have the files optimally
> sorted to fit within a 700MB space (for the purpose of later burning to
> a CD-r).  i can't get the darn thing to work, nor am i able to timely
> contact the authors of the app.  grrr....  anyway, does anyone know of
> an app or script that will do this in linux?  or would someone be
> willing to help me with the algorithem ?  i know a bit of bash
> scripting.

I need something like this.  I have a hundred blank cd's and would like to 
back up my stuff.