Collection of Egg Questions

I’ve got a collection of EGG questions piling up, so I’m going to
take a break from the series and do a Q&A with those instead. I’m
not going to name names here, so I hope that doesn’t bug anyone.
:)

Q: What are the Xconfigurator names in RH, Mandrake, SuSE,
et al? Will Xconfigurator always put LILO in the MBR? Does RH8
even have it?

A: There are some mixed issues here. The X configuration
program in RH is redhat-config-xfree86. Mandrake’s is XFdrake and SuSE’s is sax2. The GUI configuration routines have nothing to
do with LILO, which is a boot loader, so they don’t put anything
in your MBR.

RH8 comes with both LILO and GRUB for boot loaders. GRUB is the
default boot loader. You can tell which one you currently have
installed by seeing if you have the file /etc/lilo.conf, or the
/boot/grub directory. You should only have one of these!

Q: How can I find permissions of a file at command line, in
number format? Apropos permissions??? ls -l just gives the letter permissions.

A: You know, I’ve been looking around for a way to do this
at the command line, and I’m not sure there is one. If anyone
knows how to do this, let me know and I’ll pass it on!

Q: What is a Local Printer vs. a Unix Printer? What are
these LaserJet 4P types: grim-print, gimp-print-ijs, ljet4(*)?

A: A local printer is typically a printer that’s directly
looked up to your machine. Typically, a Unix printer is one that’s
somewhere else on your network and hooked up to a Unix box of some
sort.

IJS is a protocol for talking to printer drivers, so any time you
see IJS in a driver or in a program name, it supports the IJS
protocol. This protocol is used by programs such as Ghostscript to
send a raster
image to the driver, and then the driver actually processes
this image into printer instructions.

Anything with the word “gimp” in it is probably related to The GIMP, which is a graphics
program that comes with Linux. This program likely makes use of
the IJS drivers to print raster images.

ljet4, I suspect, refers to an HP LaserJet 4 printer. For more on
printing, see www.linuxprinting.org.

Q: How can I change a program icon in Panel?

A: In both GNOME and KDE, you can change the icon for any
program on your panel by right-clicking on it and then selecting
the Properties menu choice. The Properties menu allows you to open
up a menu of the available icons and change which one you’re
using. Just click the icon image in the dialog box.

Q: How can I delete a folder with files and subfolders in
it? What if it is owned by another?

A: You can delete a folder and everything it contains with
rm -rf foldername. Be VERY
careful when you do this! You can have a nasty accident if you do
this in the wrong place as root.

If the folder’s owned by someone else, you either have to be in
their same group with write permissions, or you have to be root. Otherwise, you can’t delete
it.

Q: What if I don’t have a swap partition? Can I put the
swap partition on the same partition as root?

A: You must have a swap partition, or you won’t have any
place for your computer to turn when it fills up your RAM. It
can’t be inside your main filesystem. You’ll have to create a
separate swap partition.

Q: Nautilus: How can I change floppy drives? Do I need to
unmount and remount? Any way to refresh?

A: Nautilus doesn’t have functions to load and unload
drives. You’ll have to umount
the first floppy by hand, remove it, and then mount the second.