[Sheflug] A mixed bag of problems

[nospam [at] cliffestones.demon.co.uk]

All,

I have a mixed bag of probs little things I'd just like to sort out but
are beyond me 

firstly is it possible just to copy /etc/passwd from one machine to
another?
I'm changing the HD on a box and I'd love to not have change every
users passwd in the process. It is shadowed if thats important.

Theese all affect my system a Suse 6.2 --> 6.4 graded box.

The problems I haven't managed to iron out are:
I have an internal modem which works fine but the uart on the serial
port is never set at boot. changing into runlevel 3 the script appears
to be run, IE the output echoed to the screen says it has run the
serial script. but either something else is undoing it's work or it is
not actually doing the work, no errors are reported but the first thing
I have to do is su and run the script again to actually set the uart.

I also get this error in /var/log/warn 

kernel: hdc: packet command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
kernel: hdc: packet command error: error=0x54
kernel: ATAPI device hdc:
kernel:   Error: Illegal request -- (Sense key=0x05)
kernel:   Cannot read medium - incompatible format -- (asc=0x30, ascq=0x02)
kernel:   The failed "<NULL>" packet command was:
kernel:   "42 02 40 01 00 00 00 00 10 00 00 00 "
kernel: hdc: packet command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
kernel: hdc: packet command error: error=0x54
kernel: ATAPI device hdc:
kernel:   Error: Illegal request -- (Sense key=0x05)
kernel:   Cannot read medium - incompatible format -- (asc=0x30, ascq=0x02)
kernel:   The failed "<NULL>" packet command was:

These ones general ones about sound.

I have the alsa drivers for my card. Is there anyway way to get more
than prog to be able to write to the snd card at once. esd mixes all of
my GNOME bits lovely like but it all goes pear shaped with non esd
devices. The reason I ask, is why else do I have /dev/dsp0-3 if I can
only ever use one of them at once? or am I missing something major?

I'm sure I've missed something.

Also can I just ask what are .debs like to deal with because after 1
year on rpms with Red Hat and now Suse I have developed a hatred for
them. Prety much everything I install now I build from source. I tried
installing some gtk rpms the other day but found they'd been built
against glibc 2.2 which was pretty annoying. 

Any help especially with the passwords greatly appreciated

Simon. 


-- 
Simon Brown Simon [at] cliffestones.demon.co.uk
DH/DSS Public key 0x93BE39C9
RSA    Public key 0x9052E271


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