[indiana-discuss] A Couple of Newbie Questions

[Kevin Monceaux]

Indiana Fans,

Well, I think I might have finally made the switch.  I tried switching my 
home desktop PC from Debian to Indiana a couple of weeks ago but between 
some IPS problems and lack of Solaris experience on my part I ended up 
switching to FreeBSD instead.  Last night I gave another install a try and 
I think I just about have all the things I use frequently working well 
enough to stick with it.

I've been a Linux user since the 1.xx kernel, not to mention the 486 PC, 
days.  I kinda feel like a newbie all over again banging my head against 
the wall trying to figure out some of the simple things.

First, how to I add my second hard drive to my ZFS pool?  At the moment 
I'm not even sure which devices under /dev are for my internal hard 
drives.  I tried to convince the installer that I wanted to use all the 
space on both of my drives but it would only let me select one drive.

I think there might be a minor problem with the default keymap.  My F11 
and F12 keys wouldn't work.  Adding:

xmodmap -e "keycode 95 = F11 XF86_Switch_VT_11"
xmodmap -e "keycode 96 = F12 XF86_Switch_VT_12"

to my .Xclients script took care of it.  I use DWM as my window manager 
and have it set up to use my Mod1+Fxx keys to switch between tags.  DWM 
tags are roughly equivalent to workspaces in other window managers, except 
that clients can be attached to more than one tag.

What's the preferred printer subsystem?  I noticed CUPS is installed, but 
disabled.  I tried enabling it and setting up my printer.  I ended up 
resorting to converting root from a role to a user so I could add a 
printer via CUPS's web interface.  On my first attempt a tiny fraction of 
the test page printed on my printer, after that I couldn't get anything 
else to print.  The printer in question is an HP 5L connected to my only 
parallel port.  CUPS listed two parallel ports, with three entries listed 
for each port.  I also have a USB Brother HL-5040, but it's out of toner. 
I searched the list and found some links to some non-CUPS printer 
administration docs, but haven't dug into them yet.  I know my printers 
work well with CUPS on Linux and FreeBSD, but am willing to switch to 
something else.

Does anyone have suggestions for improving the appearance of the fonts on 
Firefox?  On some web pages, the fonts look decent, on others they're 
pretty rough.

Has anyone tried using tin on Indiana?  I saw a BlastWave IPS package for 
it, but the tin I've been using for quite a while has been moderately 
tortured, um, I mean, modified by me.  All of my changes are cosmetic, so 
shouldn't be related to the minor problem I'm seeing.  On Linux and/or 
FreeBSD if I tag several articles then start downloading them it downloads 
them pretty much constantly back to back.  On Indiana it's pausing a good 
5+ seconds between each article.  For a few articles, that's not a big 
deal.  For a 1,000+ articles, it adds up quick and really slows things 
down.  I've also given hellanzb a try, and it performs about the same as 
I've seen under Linux and FreeBSD - multiple connections to the news serve 
with download speeds of 650+KB/s, so it doesn't look like a temporary NNTP 
server problem.

I may have more silly newbie questions in the near future.  Please bear 
with me, and many thanks in advance.





Kevin
http://www.RawFedDogs.net
http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org
Bruceville, TX

Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla!!!