Vakkotaur

Way back, in the days of Windows 3.x and Windows 95 when Netscape ruled the web and there was an upstart called Internet Explorer that was dubious at best (and has been dubious ever since....), I saw someone somewhere recommend a small, new web browser called Opera. It was so small the installer fit on a (3.5 inch) floppy and it had a great feature: You could tell it to NOT play those annoying animated GIFs. That was enough that I installed it, and since it wasn't free[1] and I liked it that much, I paid for it so I could keep using beyond the trial period. I kept up with updates and paid for them, too, as more features (offering ever greater user control) were added. Eventually Opera changed its scheme to allow the browser to be free. Opera also had a neat community setup and actually listened to its users. There were a couple times I submitted bug reports and got email in reply beyond the "submitted successfully" notice. At least once it even offered a fix or at least a tolerable work-around.

And then it seemed it all fell apart. The original team, or enough of it, left or were pushed out and it felt like the marketing department took over and drove the engineering types out. This a Bad Thing.[2] A complete rebuild was decided upon - but not just the core, the user interface as well, and away went the features that made Opera so great and, well, Opera. Support for Linux vaporized as well, but this was no big deal as the new versions weren't worth running anyway. So I've been running an older version as it's the newest thing available. Yes, I tried other browsers. Despite being newer (and often copying the good Opera's features, right Firefox?) or having a similar look but not the stability (SlimBoat...) they all seemed terrible clunky and didn't offer the fine control I'd become used to having.

But there is now hope. It's not a new version of Opera. I have that on my phone, and I can see while it's not as bad as it had been, it's not the real inheritor of the Opera experience. No, it's that the group that for whatever reason left Opera has come out with a new browser, Vivaldi. It also isn't "ready for prime time" but they are admitting it isn't and calling the first big announcement a Technical Preview (which is NOT a stable release) and offering weekly snapshot builds - with warnings that those snapshots are apt to have regressions ("We thought we fixed that..."). This is the blatant honesty of the old, original, good, Opera.

Vivaldi currently lacks many features. One is that I have no control to disable animations, or plugins, or allow them to run on some pages but not on others so the web looks weirdly spammy to me with Vivaldi - for now. The truly fine user-control isn't there... yet. There is no mail client (something many have come to expect). Of course there also isn't nonsense like an IRC client (what the heck is that doing in any browser?) The 'Speed Dial' size (screen layout, not number of links) isn't adjustable - I find it too big and nesting things in folders, while a neat idea, defeats the point of having a Speed Dial setup - speed!

I am still using the old version of Opera, but I am keeping Vivaldi around and keeping an eye on it. One thing the Vivaldi team is getting right is that much of the user interface acts as I expect it should (e.g. middle-clicking a link opens it in a new tab - in the background). Another is that they are starting out making Vivaldi multi-platform. I'm not on Linux waiting them to get around to making a Linux version. There's no Windows-only BS from these guys.

I suspect the marketroids that took over Opera are in for one HELL of nasty - and damned well deserved - surprise when Vivaldi approaches the old Opera's abilities and the new Opera's market share and mindshare vaporizes faster than a criticality event. I suspect I'll be wishing for Vivaldi for Android within a year's time.

I've been running Linux of one sort or another as my primary ("desktop") operating system for over a decade. While I am not The Ultimate Linux Geek or such, I have at least a fair idea of what I am doing and going back to Windows makes my teeth itch. There has been significant progress in making Linux readily usable for "the general public." While there are distributions like Slackware and Arch which expect the user to be able to pop the hood and adjust things, there are also distributions like Ubuntu and its variants and descendants that are made with the idea that the only time a user ever sees a command line is if s/he really wants to use that. It's a wonderful objective. I'd love to be able to tell people "Just use $DISTRIBUTION and everything will be taken care of." But, alas, I cannot.

The nightmares of years past, often squirrelly audio and dubious video seem to have been vanquished. CoDec issues are either obviated or readily cured with single package of a graphical package manager, if not by a system offered "Download and install these now?" option. And then we come to bluetooth. That thing that pairs up your phone with your headset or such, and after the initial setup it "just works" and you no longer think about it unless you change hardware somewhere. That's how Linux should handle bluetooth, too. Keyword: "should" And yet, that is not the case.

I had been using Xubuntu 12.04 and while bluetooth required a bit of work to install (more than one package, editing of a config file - the sort of thing *buntu tries so hard to not need) after that setup, things worked. A reboot didn't stop that. Things that worked yesterday, would work tomorrow just the same, without any intervention.

And then after I screwed something up (admittedly my own fault) I went to Xubuntu 13.10 and learned things no longer worked that way. The same is still true for Xubuntu 14.04 and therefore Mint 17 as well. The bluetooth package installs nice and easy, graphically, and appears to work. It scans around and finds bluetooth devices. But if I want my headset to work? Nope. Not until I invoke the incantation, "sudo pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover" which is odd as the system discovers things fine, it just doesn't work with all of them.

Someone, somewhere, updated something. It was meant well. But everyone seems to have rushed to embrace the update which was not yet ready for one of the more popular things to do with bluetooth: transmit and receive audio. The result is that pretty much every distribution I have tried of late has this exact same breakage. For me, it's merely annoying. If it were others of my family it would likely be, "It doesn't work." or "Why can't it do that automatically?" (I've wondered that one myself - it should happen automatically, yet does not.) or simply, "That's stupid" - and I agree. it is stupid. It's this sort of nonsense that impedes things.

Ah, but that's not all, folks. Now if I should take my headset out of range and lose the connection, all that should happen is a lost connection - and an automatically regained connection once I am reliably back in range. Instead what can happen is things stop working altogether and the incantation must be invoked again - which has a curious side-effect of quietly and invisibly breaking something else: Skype looks like it's still connected and working, but is not. And trying to close it doesn't truly end the process. Once more I must resort to the command line and issue "kill -9 <process_number>" Yes, with the -9 option or the unwanted process runs on anyway. Then, and only then, can I restart Skype and be able to actually communicate with it. And just this once, I do not believe it is Microsoft (which now owns & runs Skype) that is screwy. Microsoft is busy breaking it in other ways just now.

The frustrating thing is not simply that it's weirdly broken now, but that it is weirdly broken now when it worked exactly as it should (aside from initial setup being fiddly) earlier. Now, this will almost certainly be resolved in time, but how much? I've already gone through Xubuntu 13.10 and the problem remains in 14.04. And I'm not just picking on *buntu here. PCLinuxOS has the exact same breakage. Korora (a Red Hat derivative), at least the Xfce edition, didn't even seem to have bluetooth that could be made workable at all when I last tried it. Dangit, solved problems should stay solved. This is a reinvented wheel, but while new, it is not yet properly round. Don't ship it unfinished.

As mentioned a bit ago, I've spent the last few months slowly building up a fairly impressive machine for scarletcharnel. To satisfy any curiosity, the hardware is this:

Midtower case with three 120mm fans, one with red LED for a power light, there's audio jacks and a pair of USB 3 ports on the front panel
Rosewill HIVE 750 W power supply
A Gigabyte motherboard GA-990FXA-UD3 (AMD 990 chipset, AM3+ socket, USB3.0, 6 Gb/s SATA)
FX-8350 CPU (8-core, 4.0 GHz)
Xigmatek Gaia CPU heatsink/fan
32 GB RAM
2 TB Western Digital "Black" (5 year warranty) hard drive
DVD-R/W drive (Toshiba? not sure of make, it was simply an inexpensive SATA optical drive)
MSI GTX 660 (nVidia) Video card.

It was tempting to hang on to it longer. It was is a really nice machine. But it did, at long last, get shipped and a few days earlier than predicted arrived safely (whew!) and was soon set up. I am not sure what exactly happened and might well never know, but what work I did to make Linux and Windows co-exist and any further setup was for nought as there was some issue and the disk was wiped for a Windows reinstall. (The only good part of that is that now nobody gets to make any silly claims that I have some stupid spyware or such on that machine. At least they can't make that claim not look both paranoid and idiotic.) Still, even with that setback, things were running with fairly minor delays.

Perhaps you wonder why this machine was built, why it's decidedly more than adequate, and why it took so darn long. I had known scarletcharnel on Second Life for some time but had noticed constant and increasing complaints of limited computing power. She was using a decidedly second-hand laptop that she was lucky to find and was unlikely to be able to replace, and it was aging, at least partly from hideously bad design: Air intake and outflow vents near each other, a 64 bit CPU in hardware that lacked 64-bit drivers, a maximum of 3 GB of RAM. And heat issues of a laptop that meant often an external office fan was needed to keep it just barely within operating specifications. I'm not sure when I started thinking about what it would take to replace that laptop, but I had been thinking of that in a theoretical way for a while. Nothing really came of it as I had been thinking of a replacement laptop and that's one big all-at-once expense.

One night I mentioned this pondering and was told that while a newer laptop would certainly be nice, a desktop machine would be better. Further consideration, over some time, lead to a long term project that was a race of acquiring parts when available at a discount if possible, against the ever-declining overheating laptop. The desktop setup meant I could get things one piece at a time and use some of the things I had around as temporary testing items. I had an idle Sempron, a spare CPU cooler for a Phenom II X6, a couple spare 1 GB DIMMs, and access to a couple older PCIE video cards. It wasn't enough to build a whole machine out of, nor anything for more than a quite basic machine, but it would let me make sure things like a DVD drive, power supply, and motherboard were working. Since this machine would also not be something likely to be replaced any time soon, building it a bit overboard for current needs was a Good Idea, though that meant an increase in cost, which translated to an increase in time.

Over the next several months parts were acquired and a system assembled in bits and pieces, fits and starts. For a while I even ran it off of a USB (2.0) flash drive just to have an operating system beyond a live-CD. The extra bits that were lying about were replaced in time, with the last replaced item being the video card. In the time of building, AMD released a new set of CPUs that was a good step up from what I had been planning and I was informed of a better choice of video card than I had been planning as well.

I had pondered a lower performance, but still quite adequate, machine with an older generation quad-core CPU, 8 GB of RAM, a 1 TB hard drive, and GTX 550ti video card. Aside from the modern hard drive, that would be the equivalent of percheron which is, while my secondary machine, no slouch. But that is today, and it is my secondary, rather than my primary. Thus the changes. The case was more gamer-oriented than I might care for, but the illuminated fan at least wasn't an overly bright annoying blue but a more understated red, the fans are a good idea (I am considering adding the equivalent to my own machines). Between the well ventilated case, the Xigmatek CPU cooler, and the dual fans on a lower temperature video card, the system ran cool. I was used to having to turn a "fan stopped" alarm off, but this had me wondering if maybe the temperature sensors weren't working right. I pushed the system as hard as I could think of, short of running a compile of something, and the highest temperature I ever saw on any of the system was 43 C. Not only does it run cool, it runs rather quiet at the same time, and it displays Second Life at a frame rate so high I tended to leave the viewer's graphics settings at "Ultra" with about everything enabled.

That aging laptop? Well, sure laptops are small and concentrated and things run hotter. But this was in the 80s (Celsius) regularly and once when the external fan had been left off, climbed into the 90s. I'm not sure if it was accumulated problems from high heat, or that there was no operating system disk with all the needed drivers and thus Windows simply had to keep on going without any wipe and reinstall, no matter what might have been done, but the thing was degrading with time, to the point that in the last couple months some things either became impossible or so slow and annoying that they simply were not done. I was even wondering if I'd need to make some quick arrangement to either send the new machine in a lesser state than planned (but at least working) or make some other arrangement. Fortunately such measures were not needed.

That's the technical bits and the reasoned justification. But I will admit to taking great pleasure in witnessing some of the reactions to the new machine. A sample of the reaction over a few days as things were experienced:

I positively adore this machine, I want to pet it.

I'm already spoiled with how fast Appaloosa moves.

0.0 Holy crap
Hrm?
Jesus, I'm on mid with everything but shadows at 157 fps
So bump it up to high... or ultra...
Ultra with shadows, 45 fps O.O
(For the record, Second Life servers only push out 45 frames per second, so nothing faster is really needed there.)

(On Second Life, one thing that will slow rendering is the presence of more avatars in view. The number can be limited to help increase performance.)
There's at least fifteen people here
hardly any lag, and things are loading so FAST

I was telling [REDACTED] I'd never had a lot of these things before, a lot, and was like 'wait, let's just sum this whole thing up, I have NEVER had a machine this powerful before, ever.
I went from a tiny laptop that had literally a .1-.5 FPS on ultra with shadows to a computer that tops out at 67ish with all the same settings.

holy cow
Even friggin ArtRage runs better.

As if that wasn't enough, one thing accidentally got left behind on the old laptop and thus the laptop came out of retirement for a little bit so that item could be copied over. And the reaction was what one might expect, but it's always a jolt when one experiences it: The "Wow, is this ever slow. How did I get by with that for long?! I can't go back to that!" reaction.

Naturally, the initial excitement wears off and things return to normal, eventually. Except it's a new normal. Things that were barely possible have become easy. Things once assumed impossible have become possible. Things that were put aside a few months ago have returned. All the time, frustration, and at times cussing, fade away. I think I can claim that this particular collection of hardware is a success.

Now longer back than I care to think about (which is only August) I ordered a Solid State Drive, figuring it'd be good to have in one machine and get some experience with SSD setup. I figured I'd have to do some special partitioning and filesystem tweaking, but it would mainly be a matter of "plug it in and it works." That's how it seemed to start.

The physical mounting of things went well enough. All the hardware fit. The cables reached and locked into place. The motherboard saw there was another piece of hardware. The old disk booted up and I could set up the simple partitioning. And then the "fun" began. The install CD wouldn't boot, or at least looked like it didn't. It worked fine on belgian but was useless on percheron. So A-Googling I went and found that this is Not Unusual and there is supposedly some weird interaction with IDE DVD/CD drives and *buntu in systems that also use SATA and it's as if the boot media can't be found once things get started from it. So I started looking at and for inexpensive SATA DVD drives.

Not much later a decent deal for SATA DVD drives came up on NewEgg and I went for it, and waited for the delivery. The physical install didn't go as well this time. The physical mounting went well enough, but it's still boggling me that I managed to not seat both the power and data cables and they both have a snap-fit to them. This was foreshadowing by Reality. Once that was sorted out, the Xubuntu not booting was NOT fixed. I'm glad to have replaced the IDE DVD drive all the same, so that wasn't a big deal. But that nothing else really changed annoyed me.

Checking to see if anything would boot, I found a recovery disk (both poorly and aptly named, RIP for Recovery Is Possible) came up just fine. This was as well as I'd be using it later to repartition the old spinning disk. But Xubuntu utterly refused. It didn't even give an error message. I got a black blank screen and if I was really lucky, a blinking cursor. More research. Perhaps it was time to ditch *buntu and try something else? I looked at a few things and rejected them for lack of sufficient 32 bit compatibility (Dangit, Linden Lab, go 64 bit already. It's not 2003 any more.) or rather old kernels. I figured I'd give Xubuntu one more chance and downloaded the "Alternate" install CD.

The good: It lets one set noatime during install (lowers wear on SSD) and was simple to set up. The bad: Now the system does just what the regular install CD did: hang with a blank black screen. More Googling commences. Aha! Grub can be triggered into showing itself by holding SHIFT down just as the machine beeps on boot. There is a sort of safe/rescue mode. I get there and.. don't see anything obviously helpful, but try a resume (not re) boot.. and things work. But only with that silly start up sequence. Fine, it's something. Oh, there was some talk of video driver issues - which I'd ignored before as I needed video (even text, but console wasn't there either) to do that. Time to install nVidia's own driver(s). A proper reboot is tried and it takes a bit longer than I'd hoped (not everything is on the solid state drive) but it does finally come up right. I spend the next hour or so installing the programs I expect to have and use, and recovering from the backup I'd made of the files I wanted preserved.

There was actually more to it than that. Though many, many reboots before getting anything working there were changes to BIOS settings, reversions to standard settings, adjustments after that. Matters of IDE vs. AHCI and the switching between them. And when things looked they were about to start working, more research to be sure of what partitions to put where. (SSD has / while the spinning disk has /tmp, /var, /home and swap - though swap might never get used, it is there just in case.)

Now I can relax, or try to, as I hope things don't find one more nasty surprise to throw at me. And I hope that when I eventually replace the old spinning disk (120 GB Western Digital that's about 8 years old and has been running nearly continuously all that time) that that change will go much more smoothly. Well, I can dream.

Belgian is my primary computer and is in the office. I had been using a dual-screen setup on it with a 23 inch widescreen main monitor for most stuff, and an old 15 inch off to the side for more text based things. Downstairs, I have percheron set up so I can us it while on the treadmill and that use the 19 inch monitor I repaired last year. Meanwhile down in the basement Jay has the firewall and server machines and the most often used CRT.

Today I bought a 27 inch monitor, and Phase One of "The Monitor Shuffle" has already happened.

Phase One: Replace the 23 in monitor on belgian with the 27 inch monitor.

Phase Two: Replace the 19 in "square" monitor on percheron with the 23 in monitor.

Phase Three: Replace the 15 in secondary monitor on belgian with the 19 in monitor.

Phase Four: Replace the basement CRT with the 15 in LCD.

It's gone quite well so far and looks like the actual disconnect, reconnect, make sure of settings part will be easy enough. The only real difficulty will likely be cleaning and organizing things so that the larger gear fits into the correct spaces. Simple, sure, but simple is not the same as easy.

Right now, a bit of rest as I enjoy the nice big monitor.

The HD 3870 with the fan trouble did at least last long enough that I wasn't out of luck unable to use belgian for a while and waiting for the replacement. The replacement is (the name is silly, but the card is great) an MSI Twin FROZR III GTX 570. Ooh, is it fast. Then, at the price, weight, and power requirements, it had better be. The cooling system on this thing is heavy enough that the card seemed to self-seat. Once I had things aligned it just fell into the PCI-E slot, which caught me off guard, "Did that that just happen?". I'm glad I went with the gonzo power supply as this beast needs it. The cooling works. Despite the power requirements (38 Amps at 12 Volts - at least for the full system), it's been keeping in the high 50s to low-mid 60s C. And it's quiet. Not silent, but certainly quiet compared to what I had been hearing.

I saw Firestorm claim 90+ frames per second, for what that's worth - not much as the simulator only sends out a maximum of 45 frames each second. I've turned on some of the fancier settings and been amused by the color shading from various light sources.

Things aren't perfect, alas. They are, however, significantly better. If I had more than one Firestorm session going on belgian before and had more than one visible (not minimized) after a while I would get a hard video lockup. The screen would freeze and nothing would move. I could still ping the system and even ssh into it, so I could look around and do a clean reboot rather than hit the reset switch, but it was annoying. That no longer happens. I can have at least two sessions open, though a third does have a problem it's a milder one. When I minimize that instance, even with the other two minimized already, it is almost certain to crash. This, however, is only Firestorm crashing, not the system or the video. I doubt I can blame the video card for this. I suspect it simply lets me see something that may have been there all along.

I don't know what do do about it as nothing seems out of line. I have 6 cores and that's plenty for all that and gkrellm (system monitor) shows it. I have 16 GB of RAM and I'm not hitting swap. The video card (and system overall as far as I can tell) is runnning if not cool at least not hot). And yes, I really need to dig into the log files to see what is really happening. Then, this isn't really a pressing issue. I can certainly get by and don't really need to run more than two sessions. Come to that, I have entire other computers if I really need to that.

There's more good than bad, certainly. Now that I am rid of AMD/ATI's bletcherously wretched Catalyst setup program (which would segfault whenever I tried to actually do anything with it) on belgian I finally have a dual monitor setup. The nice new monitor has the more graphical programs (Opera, Firestorm) while the old 15 inch 4:3 monitor has most of the more textual programs (Pidgin for IM, X-chat for IRC, terminal, Exaile for music, and gkrellm). This separation works well and seems to make the best use of both monitors.

I'd been using an old laptop in the kitchen wanted something newer. A while ago I saw that the Toshiba Satellite L755D-S5104 (15.6 inch 1366x768 screen, Quad core, AMD/ATI HD6520 graphics from the A6 processor, 4 GB RAM expandable to 8 GB, 500 GB HDD) could be had for a low price, but was just above Best Buy's 18-month no-interest threshold. I went for it, planning to make it the new caspian. And then ran into trouble as I couldn't get a Linux distribution that filled my requirements to run on it.

Each distribution had some issue and with many I simply didn't get any video at all. I wound up going to PCLinuxOS's 32 bit version for a while as that at least gave me video. Then I tried Pardus when a DistroWatch comment said that worked for someone with similar problems. Alas, Pardus gave me other headaches, mainly dealing with audio and rather random behavior. More researched revealed the problem many distributions had: The HD6520 video system was too new and the 3.0 Linux kernel did not handle it well. The 3.2 kernel could supposedly deal with the HD6520. Looking around, there was something that had that and looked like it would solve my audio problems: Xubuntu 12.04, which is still in alpha.

Xubuntu 12.04 (alpha 2) is better than I expected an alpha to be. Sure, it has a couple bugs but so far none that cause me real trouble. They were minor setbacks at worst and either had almost trivial work-arounds or simply didn't matter to me. The result? I have what I set out to have: a 64-bit Linux that gives me video and audio properly and can run Firestorm.

The old laptop? I'm not sure if I'll do anything with it. It is 10+ years old after all. However it does run, if slowly, and nothing is actually wrong with it. I have this feeling it should be doing something, but I've no idea what. There is a name available for it on the network: shan.

Way back in the mists of time... er, alright, it was probably September 30 jmaynard & I went to Manktao to check out Five Guys and I figured I'd at least look at LCD monitors and perhaps see what I liked best and then order from NewEgg. We looked at two or three places and, to my surprise, the best deal was actually at Best Buy. I had been pondering a big 27-inch monitor but the resolution wasn't any better at that size so it'd just be bigger pixels. The 23-inch monitors seemed reasonably priced and comparing a few, the AOC looked the best.

I hesitated and so we went and had lunch and I thought about it some. Checking NewEgg the prices were about the same with the shipping and there was the matter of having it right away. So we went back & I (eventually... oy, it took forever to get a clerk's attention) bought it. So now I'm not using the old 1024x768 LCD but a nice new 1920x1080 LED backlit 23-inch on belgian. I still haven't truly seen about repairing the 19-inch LCD. If I can repair it I then need to decide if I want to use that for percheron or maybe even use it as a second monitor on belgian.

That cheap LCD monitor I picked up not long ago has now been pressed into service as my primary. Not because it's anything great (it isn't), but because it's the one that works. The 19-inch LCD monitor I've had for a few years no longer lights up. If I'm lucky a few dollars of new capacitors and some time (of which I don't have much just now...) will resurrect it. If not... I'll be on the backup for a while.

I had been planning on getting a newer, and bigger, monitor, but not just yet. Even with this, that won't be happening right off. I do hope that prices will drop by the time I am truly ready to buy and that is apt to be several months. So I hope I can manage to get things working again with a fairly cheap repair.

Friday morning I drove up to Mankato for a few things. One was to see if Computer Renaissance had any really inexpensive monitors. They did. I decided not to look at any of the CRTs (which I was told were really cheap, and these days I'd be surprised if they weren't). I wound up with the least expensive thing on display: A 15-inch LCD that could do 1024x768 for $50 and tax.

Once that was home, the rebuilt machine (which will be the "new" percheron, replacing a P-III system) booted up nicely and Xubuntu 11.04 appeared nicely. Yet another attempt at ArchBang did not. I have no idea why, but ArchBang which is supposed to be a neat thing has never even booted properly for me. *shrug* So I re-partitioned the drive and installed Xubuntu 11.04 on about half of it. I did that install almost in my sleep, Saturday morning.

Almost everything went well. The updates updated. The video card's proprietary driver worked. The 32-bit compatibility was already there due to a question asked (and carefully answered) at install time. Out of curiosity I tried Phoenix and it ran - at nearly 30 frames per second, though the graphics settings had to be at 'Mid' for that. It dropped to about 8 fps for 'High' and I wasn't about to fiddle with 'Ultra' considering the video card is old/low-end enough it doesn't have its own fan because it doesn't need one.

The only problem I had was the network connection which came up at 100 Mb/s rather than 1000. There is an issue with *buntu 11.04 and the Realtek 6168 but it turned out it wasn't the problem I had. Instead of my having to play games with drivers, jmaynard found that the cable was plugged into a 100 Mb/s port on the switch. Moving that to a gigabit port (and restarting percheron - yeah, I know, but it wasn't doing anything important anyway) and everything seems to be fine.

Right now I'm just letting it run. I'm more concerned about any Xubuntu flakiness than any trouble with the hardware now. I don't want to install 11.04 on andalusian (the laptop) only to find it has some screwiness I could/should have avoided.