Best of Technical Support

My machine is a p75 with a Fujitsu hard drive and a Hayes Accura 56kflex external modem. I have 4 partitions: MS-DOS, Caldera, Red Hat and swap. I have a mouse on com1 and a modem on com2. The modem works fine in DOS. In Linux, when I go into X and start seyon, an AT returns “ok” and I can dial out and get a response from a BBS or my ISP.

When I go into minicom, it does not dial out. I wait for a couple of retries and then exit minicom. As soon as I exit, minicom dials out.

If I open minicom in a vt the same thing happens. In all cases the modem init light comes on, but there is no dialing until I exit from minicom.

Can someone please tell me where I am going wrong? No one has been able to help—not Hayes, not the Caldera help line, not any of the lists where I posed the question. Any suggestions will be much appreciated.

—Ted Wager

Ok, you have a problem with minicom's config somewhere. Now I could be more helpful if I knew if an init string came up or just the familiar “Press ctrl-A Z for help on special settings.” My advice to you is go through the settings and make sure minicom is set up as it should be. (Usually it is set to /dev/modem assuming /dev/modem is a symbolic link to /dev/cua1.) Check your serial port settings and check your init string.

—Mark Bishop, Vice President Southern Illinois Linux Users Group mark@vincent.silug.org

On my home PC, the /var/adm/messages file was getting pretty big. I deleted it, then created a new one with touch. The new file's permissions are identical to the original.

But now, /usr/sbin/syslogd will not run for more than about two minutes. No data is logged to /var/adm/messages anymore. What have I done?

—Bill Cunningham Slackware

syslogd sometimes doesn't like it if the files it has open for writing are modified. Sending SIGHUP (kill -HUP) is usually enough to make it start writing to the file again.

Incidentally, I use the program logrotate to manage my syslog files. It trims them as necessary, archives old files and restarts syslogd as needed after working on the log files. It has made log file management much easier for me.

—Keith Stevenson k.stevenson@louisville.edu

I want to program multi-threaded applications. Kernel threads are available, I know. But how about thread-safe versions of much used libraries (libc and tcpip communications)?

—Peter Boncz Generic

You can try the LinuxThreads library, which is a free, kernel-level implementation of POSIX 1003.1c threads under Linux (based on the clone system call). For information about compatible libraries, check out http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/linuxthreads/.

—Pierre Ficheux, Lectra Syst pierre@rd.lectra.fr