Best of Technical Support

I'm wondering if it is possible to config the scrollable mouse to work in Linux like it works in Windows. The mouse I'm using is the Microsoft optical intellimouse. —Ray, wrathstocks@ragingbull.com

Sure! Using the imwheel command you will be able to do it. imwheel -? will tell you the correct syntax. For more information, see jcatki.dhs.org/imwheel.

—Paulo Wollny, paulo@wollny.com.br

Yes. You will find all the information you need at http://www-sop.inria.fr/koala/colas/mouse-wheel-scroll/.

—Marc Merlin, marc_bts@valinux.com

You can set this up in your /etc/X11/XF86Config file. Edit the Pointer section so that protocol is “imps/2”. Below that add these lines:

Option   "Emulate3Buttons"   "off"
Option   "ZAxisMapping"   "4 5"

Then restart X and it should work.

—Paul Christensen, pchristensen@penguincomputing.com

We have a FoxPro 2.6 for UNIX running in SCO Open Server Release 5. The users access this application from Windows using Tiny Term. We want to move these users to Linux, so far we tried Telnet, defining TERM as scoansi and several other terminals and rlogin with xterm, but we cannot get the right key mappings.

—Jorge C. Oneto, jconeto@jco.wamani.apc.org

According to SCO, many Linux distributions contain incorrect scoansi termcap entries. I believe SCO would be willing to send you a new termcap entry that will fix the problems you are seeing. (Without more details than “cannot get the right key mappings” it's hard to say what exactly is wrong.)

—David Brown, david@caldera.com

I did a migration of a FoxPro application from SCO UNIX to Linux and we had to manually modify a terminfo entry to get a 100% scoansi compatible terminal emulation. After modifying the most adequate (probably vt100 or ansi) terminfo file you will need to compile it using the tic terminfo compiler. Do a man tic to get more information about this command. I would suggest that you look at an actual scoansi emulation definition file on a real SCO system and take a close look at the escape sequences definition so you can port them to Linux (beware of copyright issues if you plan on just copying this file from the SCO system to the Linux system). Another good approach that helped me with the keyboard part is the xmodmap command that lets you define sequences for each key to be sent from the keyboard to the host on an X terminal session.

—Felipe E. Barousse Boué, fbarousse@piensa.com

What controls the composition of a password? How does the system enforce rules on length and mandatory use of non-alphanumeric characters.

—Westley L. Hespeth, hespethw@all-speth.com

For most Linux installations, it is a package called cracklib. PAM (plugable authentication module) uses cracklib to check the validity of a password by using cracklib (usually a special pam_cracklib.so or the like).

—David Brown, david@caldera.com

I am connected to the Internet with a static address. I have been seeing unauthorized FTP access to my system. Even though I have hosts.deny set to ALL:ALL.

The other thing I see is constant probes to tcpd port 1994 from user unknown. These connects look like this:

Nov 21 11:58:10 ns1 tcpd[1994]: warning:


Nov 21 11:58:10 ns1 tcpd[1994]: connect from unknown
Nov 21 11:58:10 ns1 tcpd[1994]: warning:


Nov 21 11:58:10 ns1 tcpd[1994]: connect from unknown

Any advice on plugging these holes?

—Dave Price, davep@support-one.com

It looks like tcpd is simply logging rejected connection attempts. In other words, your hosts.deny is doing its job. A much better and more flexible way to secure a machine is with ipchains. If you're interested check out the ipchains HOWTO at linuxdoc.org.

—Paul Christensen, pchristensen@penguincomputing.com

I installed the Caldera's distribution desktop 2.4 in my computer as a second OS. It's working fine.

I installed a second CD-ROM reader (ATAPI). The new reader and the ancient appears in Windows 98. But in Linux I found only the first CD-ROM. What do I have to do to declare my second CD-ROM? Is it possible to do it with KDE?

—Abderrahmane Meskine, ameskine@finances.gov.ma

You'll need to know where the CD-ROM is attached. After booting, log in as root and run:

dmesg | egrep 'hda|hdb|hdc|hdd'

(assuming it is an IDE device). Then look for your CD-ROM drive(s) in the output. Once you know the device to which your CD-ROM is attached, you can create a new device icon on the KDE desktop that points to your CD-ROM. Rightclick on your current CD-ROM icon and see what the settings are there. Then make a new device icon that is identical to the first in all settings except the actual device string. Change the device string to match what you found from the dmesg... command above (which will be something like

—David Brown, david@caldera.com