Your System is Severely Misconfigured... how?

[Cynthia Croy]

Cynthia Croy wrote:

> Jackie -
>
> I've seen this message, too. I don't know what it means either, and I 
> don't remember the context where I saw it either. Maybe this has 
> something to do with why my printer won't work. When I started up in 
> Gnome, I got a message about "Could not look up internet address for 
> localhost. This will prevent Gnome from operating correctly." I fixed 
> it by putting "localhost" (no quotes) in /etc/hosts. 

Later, in my still unsuccessful attempts to get my printer to work, I 
added 127.0.0.1 to the file. Also, I don't think you have to use 
"localhost" if you want to name you're computer something else. I did it 
this way because it's what Gnome suggested and because I was afraid I 
might have to do something else to make other programs aware of the 
change. I didn't want to introduce the possibility of even more cryptic 
messages that I have no idea how to fix.

> I had to create the file. I stopped getting the message in Gnome, but 
> I don't remember if I've seen the "severely misconfigured" message 
> since I did that. Aside from printing, I'm not having any noticeable 
> problems, so I haven't worried about it.
>
> For future reference, you should know that Linux is *always* networked.

It occurred to me sometime during the middle of the night that I might 
be overstating things here. If you're installing software on a single 
user account - for use only by that user - this might be a situation 
where you're not networked. Maybe someone else can correct me if I'm 
wrong. I've found at least two situations where I'm "networked" - 
printing and installation of software when I want all users to have 
access to it - even though I'm the only one using my computer and it's 
only connection to anyone else is the modem. So, if I have problems or 
wierdnesses in the  future, this will be one of the first places I look. 
I hope I didn't make things worse.

> If you have more than one user account i.e. root and another one you 
> use for normal tasks, it thinks you're networked. It may be different 
> if you start up in single user mode - runlevel 1 I think - but I'm not 
> sure. So this means that if you install OpenOffice.org, and you don't 
> want to get any cryptic messages about configuration files not found, 
> you need to do a network install. I found this out the hard - and 
> embarrasing - way.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> Cindy
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> yellowdog-general mailing list
> yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general
>