From Joe:
Next time you get a chance, type ddate in the shell
Wayno
Just another WordPress site
2
Mar
From Joe:
Next time you get a chance, type ddate in the shell
Wayno
18
Feb
Lessons from Loni
Okay so I installed “festival” which is a speech-to-text synthesiser.
After a lot of fudgeting, I got LOTS of errors.
So Loni had me check to see if I was a “member” of the group “audio” in /etc/group
Nope, but that was easily fixable. I copied the file to a backup.
TWO RULES WHEN WORKING WITH COMPUTERS
1. ALWAYS have a path back to the way it was, before you messed it up.
2. Follow rule # 1.
Anyway, it still didn’t work. Then Loni said: “Did you bother to logout/in?”
Umm NOOOO! We also discovered that this is an easy work around for the “break timer” (if you use it) — if you logout/in it resets the timer. I have reasons to take the break. Google “Richard Nixon’s Disease.”
As I discovered, you MUST logout/in so the changes to /etc/group will take place. DOH!
Then I got an error message that I couldn’t access /dev/dsp
Okay what the hell is /dev/dsp? It’s the digital sample and recording device.
Ahh a speech synthesiser might need that!
So we ended up chmoding (change mode/file permissions).
She suggested: chmod 666 /dev/dsp
That is the first time in my life, I’d ever chmoded anything to “666!”
(Sets read/write access for everyone!)
Note: chmod ugoa+rw /dev/dsp
is also correct.
festival worked!
BTW it took a lot of schleping to figure out that the correct syntax for festival is:
(SayText “hello world”)
Yes, the parens and double quotes ARE required! And “SayText” must be mixed case!
Interesting things to try:
(SayText “nuclear submarine”)
(SayText “irish wristwatch”)
And remember: “Soylent Green. It’s tastes different from person to person.”
Wayno
11
Feb
Well —
I shot myself in the foot the other day, on my Ubuntu 8.10 System. I made a change to fstab (the Linux file structure table) — but didn’t do it correctly……
When done editing, I did:
I did a sudo mount -a -o remount
and it re-mounted / (root directory) as read only…..since fstab was hosed…
Uh oh…….
Then I made the fatal mistake of re-booting.
I just dug the whole deeper.
After a day and half of schlepping I figured out, all I needed to do (in recovery mode as root) was:
mount -o remount rw /
then it was easy to fix.
I also discovered you can’t access devices by /dev/media….
So when I used the partition name for my backup medium /dev/sdb2 things worked! 3 min fix, day and half to figure out!
DOH!
Wayno
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.