Various Gentoo Linux Resources

October 17th, 2006

This is a collection of useful resources for Gentoo Linux.

• Binary tbz2s of essential base-system applications - If you're looking for a rescue Portage tbz2, they're available there.
• HOWTO Software Suspend v2 - Ebuild for Software Suspend v2
• Linux problems with solutions - If you have a problem, the answer may be there.

Using Swiss German Keyboard on Xorg 7.x

After upgrading to Xorg 7.0 the ALT and ALT GR keys on my keyboard didn't work anymore. When using the German keyboard layout they did. It seems the German layout was converted to the new format of Xorg 7.0 but the Swiss German equivalent wasn't.

Thanks to Kurt from the Gentoo Forum for his advice.

Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and replace the keyboard section with the following code:

Samba-Server and red crosses on Windows clients

More than often I was confronted with the problem that a freshly installed Samba server was merely accessible from Windows clients. The connection was very unstable, the client claimed it could not connect to the server and the drives linked to server shares. The typical situation was that after booting the drives were acessible but within minutes they showed red crosses and were only accessible after multiple retries.

The problem is due to the WINS-database that stores every IP address the hosts was ever associated with and when a client queries for the IP adress of the server it first gets an old, unaccessible IP address from the WINS daemon. This typically happens if you set up the server using differrent IP adresses that it will finally run with.

The solution: stop Samba, locate the file wins.dat (/var/cache/samba/wins.dat), edit it and remove every old IP adress associated with your server (or remove the file) and the start Samba again.