Users Manual 20160701

[Spartak77]

Thanks for your work Jerry. It is a great service to the community. I and Retrocomputing with our translation work have more opportunity than others to test and check the manual. In these days we have completed the translation in Italian of the whole manual. We are making a general check before giving the missing chapters at Gordon Cooper.
It is a big job (I can imagine how hard it was for you to compile it from scratch) but we are happy because it is a very value and useful document and I'm sure that translated will be read more easily and willingly by Italian users.

[aus9]

on the subject of REISUB text:

My 2 cents worth are....unless a member has good memory of that sequence or has it written down on paper IMHO its smarter to setup your bios to power off after long pressing the power button for 4 seconds. You only need to setup the bios setting once....it may already be the default and its fairly intuitive as its the known procedure for Android phone users to long press the power button to turn off a hanging OS.

[Spartak77]

its smarter to setup your bios to power off after long pressing the power button for 4 seconds

The magic SysRq key and REISUB sequence shut down the system going “through several stages that nurse your system safely out of a failure of some sort”. Normally, pressing the power button you get a brutal shut down where open programs may lose data.
You say that you can setup the bios to turning off the OS such as reisub.

I looked in the bios of 3 computers in my house and there is no reference to this. But my computers are old, what computers do you have? What refers your bios in the power setup?

[skidoo]

IMHO its smarter to setup your bios to power off after long pressing

as the saying goes, "IMHO is the operative term here".

aus9, dintya notice ~~ doG kills a kitten every time you do that !

[Spartak77]

on the subject of Basic Wireless Steps

I had the need to quickly modify the part of the manual concerning the Basic Wireless Steps. In one of my previous posts I was referring to my difficulty to understand some things a bit strange. I have not only changed the commands but I included additions to the text because it seemed to me that to give a complete picture of the wireless issues they were missing too much information.
I understand the need to avoid that the manual is swollen, but the network issues are among the top in the Linux world, and you can not think of giving an idea in 2 words. So I made some changes in the Italian version that I tried to translate into English. It is a temporary change until the new version manual comes out.
I copy here the text. The modified part of the paragraph are bold.
Obviously the English language must be corrected and the content must be controlled by those who have more skills. I am not a technician. My text is just a suggestion.

Basic Wireless Steps

Click Start menu > Settings > Network Connections (or just click on the Network Manager icon in the Notification Area), and then the Wireless tab. One of 3 situations will arise.
1. A wireless network has been found.
Click on the line that gives the name of the network.
Click Edit in the right panel, and enter your information.
When done, click OK.
2. The found network does not function after the completion of Step 1.
If wireless networks are seen but your computer cannot connect them, means that:
a) the wireless card is managed correctly by the module containing the right driver but you might have problems concerning the connection to your modem/router, firewall problems, problems with the provider, DNS problems, etc.
b) the wireless card is managed by a module that functions abnormally, because the driver is not the most appropriate for that card or there is problems of conflict with another driver.
In this case you should gather information on your wireless card to see if the card drivers may have problems and then try to test the network with a set of diagnostic tools.
Find out basic information by opening a terminal and entering one at a time:
 lsusb
 lspci | grep -i net
inxi -n
Become root in that open terminal and enter:
 iwconfig
The output from the first three commands will give you the name, model and version (if any) of your wireless card (example below), as well as the associated driver and the mac address of the wireless card; from the fourth command you get the name of the access point (AP) you are linked to and other connection information. Output example of the command inxi -n:
 Network
 Card-2: Qualcomm Atheros AR9462 Wireless Network Adapter driver: ath9k
 IF: wlan0 state: up mac: 00:21:6a:81:8c:5a
Open Tools MX (MX Tools) → Broadcom Manager
In the tab Introduction are identified the network cards recognized. The wireless card is symbolized by a small sphere. Its name is the same as we have already obtained with the above commands. Take note of the numbers in square brackets. Example:
Qualcomm Atheros AR9462 Wireless Network Adapter [168c:0034] (rev1)
The number in brackets is used to identify the type of chipset in your wireless card. The first of the two numbers identifying the manufacturer, and the second identifies the product. In this case 168c (or better 0x168c) identifies the manufacturer Atheros, while: 0x168c 0x0034 identifies accurately the product, allowing in some specific web sites to obtain the chipset id and therefore the appropriate driver.
Use the information you have gathered in one of the following ways:
Do a web search using that information. Some examples using the above commands output.
1) linux Qualcomm Atheros AR9462
2) linux 0x168c 0x0034
3) debian stable 0x168c 0x0034
Consult the Linux Wireless and the Linux Wireless LAN Support sites listed below to find out which driver your chipset needs, what conflicts might exist, and whether it needs firmware installed separately.
Try to test your router and your network. Turn off the firewall, if any, until the recognition takes place between the computer and router. Restart the router. Try to connect with a different router, for example, connect to a smartphone using its WiFi hotspot function. One less empirical way is to use Diagnostic Section in MX Broadcom Manager with which you can do the operation of ping to your router using the mac address obtained by the above commands. Then you can do ping to any website such as Google and to make the operation of traceroute. If with ping you can reach a site using its IP (you can find some of them with a web search, for example 172.217.21.36 is the ip of http://www.google.com), but you can not reach it with its domain name, then the problem may be in the configuration of the DNS. If you don't know how to use the Diagnostic Section of Broadcom Manager (called Broadcom but is valid for any card) read the wiki. If you don't know to interpret the results of ping and traceroute do a web search or post the results in the forums. Mx Broadcom Manager may also serve to replace a native driver for Linux with its Windows corresponding thanks to Ndiswrapper, or to put in blacklist a driver that interferes with the one that handles your card. About Ndiswrapper can see more details below.
Sometimes using the terminal application Ceni (in the repos) can reveal hidden access points and other difficult factors. NOTE: using Ceni to configure your network interface in MX Linux will interfere and/or disable management of that interface by the default Network Manager. Ceni stores its configuration info in /etc/network/interfaces. Any interface defined in /etc/network/interfaces will be ignored by Network Manager, as Network Manager assumes that if a definition exists, you want some other application managing the device. So Ceni could work well to connect but it must be said that shows a semi-graphical interface rather spartan. If you later want to use Network Manager, with which it is interfering, there could be problems.
Post your information on the Forum and ask for help.
3. No wireless interface is found.
Open a terminal and type the 4 commands seen above. Identify the card, chipset and driver you need by doing a web search and consulting the sites reported, according to the procedure described above.
If you have an external wifi device and no information on a network card is found, unplug the device, wait a few seconds then plug it back in. Open a terminal and enter:
 dmesg | tail
Examine the output for information about the device (such as the mac address) that you can use to pursue your issue on the web or the forum.
Probably the most common example of this situation arising is with the Broadcom wireless chipsets; see the Technical Documentation Wiki.


I added to the 3 link below even this: Linux Wireless LAN Support http://linux-wless.passys.nl/

As in the copy text into this place I lost text formatting, attaching my file. It can be more easily watched

WirelessSteps.odt

[Spartak77]

aus9, dintya notice ~~ doG kills a kitten every time you do that !

[Jerry3904]

@spartak: thanks a lot for the great work you put into this! Those are good changes and suggestions, and I will consider them carefully when I turn back to the Manual.

[Spartak77]

I found a mistake in my text about the Wireless Steps.
I wrote

One less empirical way is to use Diagnostic Section in MX Broadcom Manager with which you can do the operation of ping to your router using the mac address obtained by the above commands.

it is correct so:
One less empirical way is to use Diagnostic Section in MX Broadcom Manager with which you can do the operation of ping to your router using the ip address written in its user manual.

[Jerry3904]

Work is starting to be more reasonable for me, so I have copied the posts (one-at-a-GD-time) into a document and will start slowly revising the Manual for an early October upgrade.

[Gordon Cooper]

Thanks Jerry