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Month: January 2008

konqueror (nautilus?) file browser and kwrite (kate?)text editor setup hints

Published by jweisber on 2008-01-15

Added by jmw 2020 may 28: Maybe these konqueror and kwrite config hints are still somewhat useful for nautilus and kate???

I find konqueror the best file browser for linux. To customize it a little, for example to get .idl files to open with my favorite text editor, kwrite:

with konqueror running:
settings>>configure konqueror gives some options like what your home dir should be (eg /home/youusername

to make conqueror behave a certain way with a certain kind of file, i made in my home dir (/home/jweisber) a file called dummy.idl

if you select it inside konqueror (one click to highlight it)

go to edit>properties
it should pop open a window labelled “Properties for dummy.idl – Konqueror”
‘way to the right of “type” is an icon of a bunch of tools. push on it.
it should pop open a window labelled “Edit file type application/idl KDEditFileType- Konqueror”
if its not already there, add a filename pattern of *.idl
that means any file ending with that will be treated in the way you are getting ready to set up

under application preference order, enter
kwrite

if you wish, you can also associate a pretty icon with *.idl by clicking on the “?” icon to left of “filename patterns”

click ok and from now on , when you dble-click on any file ending in .idl, it should open it with kwrite (see addition below)

(you may have to entirely quit and restart konqueror for the new properties to take)

–jmw january 2008

——addition feb 2008 – to get kwrite to use “syntax highlighting” (ie to color idl files with a certain color set; fortran etc etc):

open an idl file in kwrite.

in the kwrite toolbar up top, hit settings>configure editor>highlighting

now here is what took me more time than i am willing to admit:

the panel should now be labelled highlighting rules.

the first thing to do is to select a type from the pulldown menu near the top; eg “sources idl ”

then inside properties:file extensions, type *.pro;*.idl;*.batch

inside properties: MIME types, type application/idl

then hit the icon on the far right of this line and get a panel saying “Select the mimetypes you want highlighted using sources/idl syntax highlight rules”

and check the relevant mime types.

(note if the right mime types arent there, see joel)

note that some of these properties do not “take” until you jump out of konqueror and restart it!

Algol can now talk to its SDLT Tape Drive

Published by jweisber on 2008-01-11

Algol has never been able to properly communicate with the SDLT tape drive. The symptoms were that you could write/read single small file to/from the tape drive, but an attempt to write a *directory* to it drive would fail with this message in shell:

tar: /dev/st1: Cannot write: Input/output error
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

…and this message in /var/log/messages:

Jan 9 15:20:08 algol kernel: st1: Error with sense data: Current st1: sense key Aborted Command
Jan 9 15:20:08 algol kernel: Additional sense: Synchronous data transfer error

The first thing that James Fuller and I did was to see if the other tape drive, a sun 8mm exabyte drive known to algol as /dev/st0, was working. It worked fine. That indicated that algol’s Adaptec 39160 scsi controller card was as least partly working.

The next thing we did was reboot algol. This wasn’t really planned as part of our attempt to get the tape drive working, but rather to test the newly installed idl7.0 license manager. But it was a good thing we did. During the boot sequence we saw a screen titled “Adaptec SCSI Select: hit Ctrl-A to enter”. Prior to this time we had no idea such a utility existed. It’s basically a BIOS for the scsi controller card.

We hit ctrl-a, entered the utility and poked around. The utility enables you to see, for each of the two “channels” A & B (ports), the devices mapped to device ID’s 0-15. On channel A, only the scsi controller itself is mapped (to device ID 7). On channel B, the exabyte tape drive was mapped to device id 0, and the Quantum SDLT was mapped to device ID 6 and the scsi controlloer to device ID 7.

Each channel screen showed a matrix of the devices and parms for each device. The first such parm was “Initiate Wide Negotiation”. This rang a bell in James’ head — he remembered reading somewhere that this parm, when turned on, could cause problems for some scsi devices. So we turned it off for device 6. Note: making this change had the side effect of changing the communications speed value from 160Mb/s to 40Mb/s.

However, when we exited the utility and allowed the reboot to complete, we could write to/read from the SDLT tape drive.

I verified that it was really working by writing /home to it, reading it back to a temporary location, and then doing a recursive diff (diff -rq /home /root/foodir/home) against the original and the copy read from the tape. There were no diffs, and /home takes up 1.5G so I feel confident that Algol can really talk to the SDLT tape drive now.