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I've been using Xfce for several years now. First as it was light enough to allow an even-then ancient laptop to be if not speedy, at least not overly sluggish. Then as it got out of my way, exactly the that GNOME and KDE didn't. Alas, something about is now getting in my way and I haven't yet found a way to turn it off - and I have looked. Perhaps just not with the search terms that someone else believes are obvious.
Due to switch bounce or accidental double-clicks I have discovered that a double-click on the right (or left) edge of a window will cause that window to be horizontally maximized. This is NOT the 'drag to the top to horizontally maximize' option which is readily disabled. All too often I will be scrolling down a web page and *BOING* I suddenly have a browser covering the monitor screen from left edge to right (but, thankfully, not top to bottom as well). This is annoying. I don't want this. And I have yet to find any setting or control to disable this annoying misfeature.
I am not quite to the point of bailing on Xfce. Otherwise, I find Xfce to be if not ideal, certainly more than merely good enough. However, if this irksome misfeature can't be disabled, I fear I must start the likewise irksome process of seeking a replacement Desktop Environment/Window Manager.
I still have the bluetooth issue, but at least I have an idea it will be resolved. It's just a matter of how soon. Seems that once upon a time as things were changing Blueman (the bluetooth manager program recommended for Xubuntu 14 and Mint 17 Xfce) had some trouble with PulseAudio and so unloaded the PulseAudio bluetooth module and handled that itself. Or else PulseAudio had an issue, but the result was the same. Then whatever it was got fixed, the do-it-myself work-around in Blueman was removed, but the unloader was left in. Now I wait for a new stable version to reach the repositories so I can update it nicely and have a system without needing an incantation at every boot.
My vacation, which just ended, involved some time in Merrill visiting my mother and other family and friends. It was nice, relaxing week for me. And I brought home a few things, including a printer and flatbed scanner that had been sitting idle for some time. Also, a little USB-cassette gadget that I'd ordered a while back had arrived. All this stuff takes some room and my desk was a cluttered, jumbled mess. So the first order of business (after unloading the car, unpacking, and starting laundry...) was clearing and rearranging the desk. It's better now, but it still wouldn't appear in Better Homes & Gardens. I wouldn't want it to, anyway. It's to be used, not just for display.
The cassette gadget replaces a tape deck and I was amused that the software that was included was Audacity. Sure, the paper said it was Windows & Mac, but the device presents as a USB microphone and I've been using Audacity in Linux for years. But it only worked if I used a USB2 port, not a handier USB3 port. Port speed wasn't important, but that problem lead me to investigate. No USB3 ports were truly working. They had power, sure, but Mint 17 wasn't seeing them right. It was the IOMMU issue again. That took installing Grub Customizer so I could add 'iommu-soft' to the boot parameters and be done. And done it is. I have all the USB ports working again. And the USB-cassette gadget? Works fine, after a little fiddling with PulseAudio settings to get everything just so.
The printer install went very well indeed. I simply told Mint 17 to add a printer and it pretty much went, "Oh this one? Can I download this driver? Wanna print a test page?" and the biggest delay was finding paper. It went so fast that I was disappointed it didn't print, only to find out it had printed. It was just that fast about it. Now I wanted to print stuff, but realized I really only had a need to print a few times a year. At least now I can do that directly and be done.
The scanner took more doing. It's not exactly new. As in, it uses a USB 1.1 connection. And, alas, Linux scanning tools do not support it directly. The result was that while the system saw it fine, the scanning programs went, "What scanner?" The adventure began. Of all the various web pages, this one seemed to be the most useful, even if it was for a different scanner. It has its own problem, which is that Avasys no longer supports the scanner, Epson does. So instead of the Avasys page, I needed Epson's download page and then I goofed and wound up wasting too much time. There are two download pages needed, but three things to download. I kept missing the data file that everything else depended upon.
What's needed? These:
iscan-data_1.29.0-2_all.deb
iscan_2.29.3-1~usb0.1.ltdl7_amd64.deb
iscan-plugin-gt-s600_2.1.2-1_amd64.deb
Once I realized that error and snagged the data file, Epson's scanning program installed. Annoyingly, it then went, "Scanner? What scanner?" but Simple Scan finally went, "Oh, look, a scanner!" and works. I seem to need to disconnect & reconnect it for each session, but it does work. And despite USB 1.1, doesn't seem terribly slow. Now, what do I need to scan?
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.
IRQ Conflicts Live
30 November 2013 05:39Gigabyte Blew It
About three years ago my aging & rather ancient computer well and truly died. I shopped around some and settled on a few things. One was a Gigabyte motherboard, the GA-890XA-UD3 which I am using right now as I type. It has worked just fine for these last three years with no special setup beyond updating the BIOS (for which having a lowly Sempron around is a Good Thing). The only thing it really lacks is an AM3+ socket so unless I upgrade the motherboard, I can't upgrade the CPU. And thus the (mis)adventure begins...
Last year I was building up a machine for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
scarletcharnel and selected another Gigabyte motherboard, the GA-990FXA-UD3, which had about everything, including USB3 and an AM3+ socket and that just worked. I didn't even need to update the BIOS. This was Rev 1.1 which as far as I know is just fine. If there is a heat/throttling issue, it's hasn't shown up. That system has great ventilation and cooling.
Thus I felt fairly safe ordering another GA-990FXA-UD3 board for myself, to upgrade belgian or at least allow upgrades (new case case with more ventilation/fans, new video card, eventually a newer CPU, and maybe more RAM). Alas, that was not the case. I tried moving everything at once and things got seriously weird. Lost trackball and keyboard, unless I plugged them into USB3 ports. Lost networking. Once, in a diagnostic boot of RIP Linux, USB2 worked but USB3 didn't - and there was no indication of why. Network worked then, but only just then. I moved everything back to get a working system, then swapped out video cards and had no issue.[1]
My next night off was spent trying again, this time with the Sempron that jmaynard had been using for something, a couple 1 GB DIMMs of DDR3 1333 (instead of four 4 GB DIMMs of DDR3 1600), the GTX 570 (which was replaced by a GTX 760 [2] in the working belgian) and a LiveCD. And everything just worked. What the heck was going on? But I knew that the hardware could work and the board was not automatically bad. Everything also worked fine in BIOS setup screens and such[3].
So I figured I'd try a part by part move and see what happened. Moving RAM should be the most trivial, uneventful thing, right? WRONG. Well, right, it SHOULD be that way. It wasn't. I pulled the 2 GB of 1333 and put in the 16 GB of 1600 and the problem(s) reappeared. What the photon? Dropped to 8 GB (2 DIMMs). Problems. Swapped those two for the other two. Problems. Tried the other two sockets. Problems. Tried only 1 DIMM (4 GB). Problems. Tried slowing the timing to 1333, and even to 1066. Problems. Tried upping the RAM voltage a bit. Problems. Put everything back to AUTO and put the 1333 back in and things worked. Put the 16 GB back in the working belgian and that works.
Looking at things, it feels eerily like the bad old days of IRQ conflicts and the weird breakages that resulted. Turns out that was what was going on.
I pulled a DIMM (8 GB) from the machine that had the Sempron and try that, so I can keep my main system working until I figure things out - or return the board. Eventually I find online that there is a setting for IOMMU that is DISABLED, but switching to ENABLED makes things work - for some. Not for me. More delays and more research and I finally find someone who had the same problem that enabling IOMMU didn't fix. But he had a solution: tell the kernel "iommu=soft" at boot time. Aha! That makes everything work. USB2 works. USB3 works (the ports work, I might need to confirm USB3 speeds rather than USB2 fallback), and the network is there and working.
What is IOMMU? Input-Output Memory Management Unit. The thingie that is supposed to prevent IRQ conflict issues in this modern, enlightened Plug & Play age. Somehow, in Rev 4.0 of this board or the BIOS, Gigabyte managed to break it in a way that Linux detection can't (yet) detect automatically compensate for. And what happened, exactly? I don't know all the true low-level details, but below 3 GB of RAM, IOMMU doesn't seem to matter very much. Thus running on only 2 GB or only mucking about in BIOS screens, all was well. Above 3 GB (I tested with 4, 8, and 16... all more than 3) it's needed. But if it isn't working quite right, there are problems anyway. The kernel message is sort of "Assume IOMMU is messed up and compensate for that."
I hope that's the only issue with this board. In my research I found that it can, now, supposedly even take the new AMD factory-overclocked (and crazy hot, power hungry) FX95XX CPUs that are rated at a staggering 220 Watts instead of a "mere" 125 Watts. I have exactly zero plans to use such a thing, but I could. That would seem to indicate any power issues (Rev 3.0 has tales of woe regarding such) have been resolved. Still, the IOMMU screwiness makes me wonder if anything else is messed up. I had been at the point of considering only Gigabyte boards[4] since I had some weirdness with an (admittedly cheap, open box) ASRock board and Jay had something a bit odd (but since forgotten, so evidently not critical) about an MSI board. Now? Now the next time I go motherboard shopping, I probably won't be gravitating to Gigabyte. Not sure what way I will go, but I really do not need this time-sink of a headache that makes me think of the bad old days of twenty years ago[5].
[1] I did have one issue, but that was a self-inflicted thing unrelated to all this.
[2] I saved up for good many months to be able to get that. It still was jarring to order it.
[3] Nobody likes the BIOS setup for this board. It well and truly sucks. It might be worth considering another make just to not have to deal with that turkey of a setup.
[4] Despite the stupid Windows executable file used for BIOS updates when a zipfile would be easier all the way around, for everyone - even them.
[5] Gad, has it been that long?
This post is mainly a note to myself so I have a simple but very useful (at least to me) script in a place I can find readily in the future. Go ahead and skip this post. It's supposed to be boring.
( A one-liner at its core. )
For some time now, since at least August, I've been acquiring parts and building up a computer (for scarletcharnel). The hardware was the easy part. I had a bit of a time with a Linux (Xubuntu) install to test things out. I purposely held off on installing Windows (not my choice of OS, but this isn't my machine) until I had all the hardware that it would have to deal with. I did not want to deal with whatever nonsense Windows has about authentication and hardware changes. So, after I confirmed that everything was working, I set out to install Windows (7, 64 bit, Professional). And I cussed and grumbled more than I had in years.
It's actually fairly simple, but only to someone already familiar with Windows quirks. For a confirmed Linux user, it's an exercise in frustration as Windows consistently fails to do the right thing. So, here goes, for my own future reference, as through this I wound up with an extra copy of Windows (7, 64 bit, Home Premium) and might yet go though this again.
Zeroeth, set BIOS and such to use EFI mode, even for the DVD/CD drive. Yes, this is important. At least for the Windows install. If you do not do this, Windows will insist it cannot install to a GPT (bye bye MBR, we're using big disks now) partition. Linux will simply go where you point it. Set up the disk as GPT. I recommend PartedMagic for disk partitioning (gparted is your friend), re-sizing, and all the badgering you'll need to do make Windows co-exist with Linux.
First, be prepared to fully back up everything or lose it. Windows does not play nice with other operating systems and demands to be the first (and "only") thing installed on a fresh disk. Stupid, but it is Windows where stupid is standard. Now install Windows. It will whine that the system that booted many times just fine might not boot do to configuration issues. Windows is an idiot. Ignore the idiot and go on with the install. It will create three partitions: an EFI boot partition, a Windows recovery partition, and a Windows partition.
Next is to shrink the Windows partition to not take up the whole disk (besides the efi/boot and restore partitions). Allegedly Windows can do this itself, but I don't trust it any farther than one could comfortably spit a rat. I used gparted from PartedMagic and shrank the Windows partition. I also created another NTFS partition for the user that is at least somewhat isolated from the main Windows partition. If Windows must be reinstalled, it can do upgrades or repairs with less (though not zero) risk to the user data. Boot into Windows and let it cope with the new size of the world, which it will whine about. Too bad. In a glimmer of hope, Windows will see and mount the new user partition.
Unless you want to deal with the Linux install right away, now is probably the time to hunt down all the boxes the hardware came in and dig out the manufacturer's driver disks. You get to play disk swap for a while installing everything as Microsoft hasn't got a nice easy software repository to make life simple and easy. Also, it might need you to give drivers for drop-dead common networking hardware and stuff like USB ports. Yes, Windows really is an idiot.
Reboot with PartedMagic and use gparted to create the Linux partitions. I kept it fairly minimal with / and /home and swap. /home by itself for the same reason as the separate Windows user partition: keeping OS and user data somewhat isolated just makes sense. I made the Linux partitions (aside from swap, of course) ext4.
Another reboot with the Linux install disk and, if the hardware & software get along (I don't know why, but *buntu 12.04 tends to go black screen on new hardware for me) you simply install. As I wanted Xubuntu 12.04 and it wasn't behaving as it ought, I installed Xubuntu 11.04 and let it update itself to 12.04 when it asked. Yes, that 12.04 is goofy this way shows lack of clue somewhere, but at least I had networking and such right off. (Windows: Durrr, what's a USB port? Linux: Oh, hey, I found this camera on one of the USB ports, want me to take your picture for the login screen?). At the end, install grub2 to the / partition.
Use Parted Magic again, but don't let it boot up by itself. Stop it at the first graphic screen and choose Extras and have it boot with grub. It will find the Linux install and boot from there (just using the hard drive will boot Windows without any choice). Do NOT waste time with EasyBCD to try to cajole Windows into doing the right thing. EasyBCD doesn't (yet?) handle EFI so it will only waste time. In Linux, run the updates as needed, and be sure the correct video driver gets installed - don't want to end up with a blackscreen from Xubuntu 12.04 again.
Find and install BootRepair. Sadly, this is not in the *buntu repository so a bit of command line work and using an alternate repository will be needed. Run it. Decide which operating system should boot by default. In this case, I decided it ought to be Windows. Not what I'd do for myself, but again it's not my machine.
Enjoy dual boot. Set up Windows, set up Linux, installing whatever programs seem to be good to have around. One of them is Ext2Read which will let Windows see (read only, unless you like living dangerously) the Linux ext4 partitions. This is better than leaving Windows to claim they need to be formatted. Windows, by itself, doesn't grok much in the way of filesystems.
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.
I am in need of a proper headset w/mic. to use with Skype (I have yet to truly set things up for use, so don't waste effort trying to call me). I have not been too impressed with what I've tried so far as one part or another fails, but I haven't spent a great deal on getting a fancy headset either.
So: Recommendations? Would a USB headset be a Good Idea or an invitation to disaster? Should I consider wireless at all?
Nice idea, but...
14 October 2011 23:00
There are many, many things I could talk about but right now I'll settle on a more mundane one. I've been running ConnochaetOS on caspian for a while and some things about it grate a bit. So when I heard someone gushing about Bodhi Linux that could run on even a 386, I decided to try it. I am both impressed and disappointed in the result.
Impressed: It boots as a LiveCD, even on caspian. Takes a long, long time, but it does come up.
Disappointed: Like ConnochaetOS it defaults to an ugly 800x600 rather than correct 1024x786, but the showstopper is: Network? What's a network?
I can deal with the resolution, but the network issue? No. Not fiddling with that, not right now. I'll keep running Conn...OS and maybe try Bodhi again later. And since I've heard that the plan is to move away from being Debian-based (something I consider as a Good Thing) later may be better.
After rebuilding jmaynard's old computer and then rebuilding what is/will become percheron I must have gotten into a get old hardware working again mood. A few years ago I out DeLi linux on a 90 MHz Pentium machine and was impressed with icewm, though getting things working was a bit involved.
( Not quite as involved now... )
I am not a fan of the Debian family of distributions, and it's not just because of the idiotic GNU/ prefixing. I had found that *buntu tended to "help" me too much by getting in the way. Even so, I am now running Xubuntu 10.04[1] on the laptop (palomino on the rare occasion I boot it into Windows, andalusian for Linux). Why? Salix had video issues I could not get around and Xubuntu is the lighter of the *buntu family (While I don't mind KDE, it is heavy and Kubuntu has long been the "red-headed stepchild" of *buntu. Gnome? The less said of it the better.) and it's available in 64-bit right now, it boots, it installs, and it doesn't have any video weirdness - although despite the Hardware Driver tool saying it might help, one must not install the fglrx ATI/AMD video driver. It actually makes things worse.
It hasn't been all automatic. I am really glad I had previous Linux experience before this. Getting the wireless working was an adventure. Realtek seems to only acknowledge Windows when one goes driver hunting, though they do have a linux driver. Finding it is a challenge. Downloading it is another challenge. I had to resort to much Google searching to find the right page to find the driver's exact name, then Google search for that and download it from a third party. Once installed, the only real trouble I had was at my folks' place and that was solved by re-setting the wireless router. There are a few wireless networks in the neighborhood here, but only one is wide open.
The Synaptic touchpad had the intensely annoying "tap-to-click" (which means, "bump to screw up focus") that has no simple GUI means of being shut off. Eventually I found someone else had the same issue and there was a post about how to disable tap-to-click. That bit of script saves much cussing.
Getting Phoenix running meant getting the 32-bit libraries (easy enough, ia32 in Synaptic) and disabling the hardware warning since it doesn't know the video is good enough without the lousy fglrx driver installed. Getting streaming audio involved editing the startup script since it disabled gstreamer if it found itself on a 64-bit platform and evidently doesn't play nice with Fmod OpenAL on 64-bit Xubuntu.
The rest, so far, has been installing the programs I expect to be around or finding things close enough in the Xubuntu repository, and tweaking the XFCE setup to also be what I've come to expect. There is more setup to do. This time, I am NOT simply copying over Opera config files, but slowly rebuilding the bookmarks and settings so they're clean. I might copy the config files back from the laptop once that is done.
I still need to figure out to get the internal microphone and camera to work (and how to be sure the camera is disabled when I don't want it on... there's always the surefire method: a bit of tape). I think those are the last of the hardware type issues.
And just as all that is going on, PCLinuxOS's Texstar announces that PCLinuxOS will be getting a 64-bit version, which had it happen earlier would have been the right answer, or at least a better one than *buntu. When it finally is released, I will be trying it. I will be surprised (and disappointed) if it doesn't work better than Xubuntu.
All that said, it's nice having having new hardware. Things are, as expected, fast. While running two sessions of Phoenix does push things (I think one needs at least n+1 cores to properly run n sessions of Phoenix), it doesn't bog down badly, though the CPU usage goes up to near if not quite 100%. The 'desktop' machine (now 7+ years old!) bogs down badly if I try that. And even though I am running Linux, I usually end up needing to reboot (not just restart X) after that.
[1] Yes, I know 10.10 is out. But 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" is Long Term Support and, unlike, 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat", runs and installs cleanly. I agree with ESR, "Ubuntu 10.10 is fucked up."
Last week Monday I bought the thing and didn't have time to do much more than sleep once home. Since then I've done more, of course. I considered BLAG (A 64 bit version of Fedora, really), Unity (a group that split off from PCLinuxOS), Arch and ArchBang, and Salix (Slackware with dependency checking). BLAG looked nice aside from not having codecs and since it's Fedora (Red Hat) based, I know from experience what a pain it is to get them. Also, the new release of Fedora has a fair amount of detractors who are going, "Hang on, isn't this supposed to be BETTER than the last one? Why is so much broken?"
I tried Unity and found it was a "base" system - not meant to be run by itself, really, but for other distributions to have a common starting base. I tried ArchBang and it refused to boot, claiming hardware conflicts that nothing else seems to have any trouble with. I have not (yet) tried just plain Arch though I might yet.
The idea of something Slackware-based (fast, non-crufty) with dependency resolution appealed and so SalixOS won out... so far. After squashing Windows 7 into a mere (ha!) 100 GB of the drive and further partitioning the drive to give Linux space to live, I installed the 64-bit version of SalixOS and it seemed to go smoothly. It detected Windows, asked if I want Linux to be able to see the Window partitions and how much access there should be, and set up lilo[1] to dual-boot. Synaptic was there and even Opera was in the repository. Pretty good... but not great.
I've had to edit fstab to get the Windows partitions truly accessible as I intended (user can see it all, but it's read only so as not to risk messing up the NTFS filesystem it uses), I tweaked lilo.conf so Linux was the default and not Windows. I had to use the command line alsamixer to get the speakers to make sound. Alright, it's Slackware-ish and some configuration is to be expected.
But there are two big issues. One is that the wireless setup wasn't discovered on install. Fortuantely the wired stuff works without any issue, so I can do some stuff. I expected to need to do some setup myself with that, but it'd be nice to have the wireless 'card' detected. Supposedly the linux kernel has support for the chip (Realtek rtl8192e if you're curious) so no added driver should be needed. But SalixOS doesn't have the firmware file that would make it work. I've search quite a bit and can't find the file. I can find where it used to be (all dead links) or people talking about it, but not the needed thing itself.
The other is the graphics. For most stuff, the default install works just fine. But for one program, the one I based my buying decision on being able to run, it doesn't work. It flickers. Just the one window. Everything else is fine. I've tried installing the proprietary ATI drivers (ATI Radeon Mobility HD 4200, for what it's worth) and the flickering.. slowed down. I've left a question about that on the Salix forum, but haven't gotten any reply as yet.
I do have some time. I can still return the laptop (30 days...) and maybe try another. Or try another distribution. It is rather frustrating that things that ought to "just work" don't. I've even considering going to the dark(er) side and trying some non-GNOME-ish version of *buntu. I'd rather not do that. Maybe I will try Arch, I can always go back to Salix easily enough if I get a solution for it. Windows? No. I considered it for a bit, but then it reminded me why I hadn't used it in years. Windows 7 does seem a lot like Windows 2000 (for a Microsoft product, that's a compliment) but it was still a relief to boot into something else, even if it was just the partitioning tool... which shrunk the Windows partiton more than Windows claimed was possible.
[1] Odd to see lilo, as I am now so used to seeing grub as boot manager, but Slackware can be rather old school about things if they still work.
The new laptop (see previous entry) presents a question of what,exactly, to run on it. Is it worthwhile to go for a 64-bit Linux, or am I better off staying with 32-bit for now? With 64-bit cores it seems like 64-bit would be the way to go, but I've seen things pointing out that not much is actually compiled for 64-bit and some stuff has to then run in a sort of simulated 32-bit environment. One potential factor, memory, is not a factor as the maximum addressable memory is 4 GB and I have "only" 4 GB, so I don't need to go 64-bit to use all the RAM.
The other part is, if I do go for 64-bit, then which distribution? And, no, it will NOT be Ubuntu or Debian nor (hopefully) any of their cancerously multiplying derivatives. I would like it very much if the Linux-using internet would kindly pull its head out of Ubuntu's behind. Alas, there is not a 64-bit version of PCLinuxOS or the distribution decision (for 64-bit) would be trivial.
A few days ago I started having computer problems that were not purely software related. One piece of software which is rather demanding of the video system seemed to cause a hard crash as I could only run it for a few minutes. Yet I could run everything else for hours. But previously I did not have that problem so something was wrong. I had heard an odd fan noise a bit earlier and so started looking at the fans.
The first time I looked the case fan was operating, the power supply fan was operating but the supply was hot rather than just warm, the CPU fan and the video card fan were also operating. A day or so later with things worse I found the problem. The power supply had two fans. One wasn't moving, the other was only barely moving. I shut things down and used a different computer as well as jmaynard's eeePC.
A couple days of using the eeePC convinced me that I would not be replacing the laptop(s) with a netbook as I had pondered doing. The thing is rather underpowered (as expected) and the keyboard is only almost big enough to not be frustrating.
Monday we went to Mankato and I bought a replacement power supply, which I am now using. We also decided to take a look at what laptops might be had. The kicker is that I need a non-intel graphics chipset since I now want very good graphic performance under Linux and intel graphics simply won't cut it. The first time I looked around I got sticker shock as the only things I saw that fit were in the $1,200+ range. But this time we saw a few things in the $600+ range. Combined with Best Buy's (yeah, but it was really the only choice) 18-month interest-free financing it got seriously tempting. After looking at three different models I rejected the GateWay with the Turion not (just) for being a GateWay or the Turion but mainly from poor keyboard layout. The process repeated and after much questions and electronic forms being filled out, I now have a Toshiba Satellite L675. That's an AMD Phenom II X2 (dual core 64 bit) at 2.9 GHz, with 4GB RAM and a 500 GB HDD. And ATI Radeon 4250 graphics. And Windows Home Premium, which I plan to use very little. Oh, and a big beautiful 17.3 inch 1600 x 900 pixel screen. And a keyboard that is Not Tiny.
I've used it only briefly so far. Just a bit of setup and making the 4 DVD set (yowza!) of recovery discs. I know I have some issues to resolve, such as if I should go with a 32 or 64 bit Linux distribution and if 64, which one. Also, transporting this thing will require something other than the laptop bag I've been using. The L675 is too big to fit in that bag - and I probably want it better protected anyway should I actually travel with it.
Yes, that goes for you, too, Google. Providing search results that are Ubuntu-heavy when my very first search term is Gentoo is annoying and not all that useful.
The laptop I've been using is a Compaq Armada 7800 which is a 266 MHz Pentium II. Sounds a bit dated, doesn't it? It is.
I first ran Ultima Linux on it, and had the problem of wireless being cantankerous. When Ultima's website went *poof* I looked around and switched to Wolvix, which was an improvement. Then Wolvix had a new release, so I upgraded. That was a good idea, almost. Something in the new version chews up CPU. If I stop udevd the CPU usage drops from 100% to a more reasonable 7% or so. But even then there is an annoying seizing of the pointer that happens often enough that the machine is hardly usable. And the Wolvix site has been unreachable for me today. That's not encouraging.
I tried Xubuntu 7.10 (again) and it wouldn't boot the LiveCD fully, even in the "safe" mode. Same thing for TinyMe (a light version of PCLinuxOS that I'd love to be able to run). Anti-X, which is a light version of MEPIS and not a command line only thing despite the name, did the same. All those boot on a much faster desktop machine.
I tried Feather Linux, which actually booted and ran on the laptop. I might try it again and see if I can get wireless working. Or I might try another distribution, such as Absolute Linux.
In all the searching for answers to the boot problems I happened across a review of the laptop. It was dated 1998. This machine is nearly ten years old now. New machines run a few versions of CPU newer and clock a full order of magnitude faster. No wonder I'm having trouble finding something that it will run and run well.
I expect that if I keep looking and keep at things long enough I could get a workable system again. But now I am wondering if it would even be worth the effort. Also, the PCMCIA card doesn't handle WPA. Or rather it can be made to handle it, but only under Windows.
The only three real options right now are:
1. Compaq Armada 7800 (P-II 266 MHz)
...with all the problems above, including the lack of WPA.
2. A newer Dell (P-III 700 MHz ?)
This would have the lack of WPA problem, and I had similar boot problems with it when I was suspicious of the Compaq a few months ago, and it also suffers from being a Dell.
3. PowerBook G4 (G4 867 Mhz)
This one has OS X (yes, the newest version, whatever cat it is this time) so it is unixy underneath, and WPA does work. Unfortunately the surface isn't quite as unixy as it ought to be and I'd be stuck with the color scheme I'd scrap in an instant if only I could. Really, if I could fix that easily, I'd probably already be using this machine. It *is* unix underneath, right? Shouldn't there be a simple .config style file to edit to fix the colors?
So I have a choice of two machines that don't work and one that works but I'd have to stare into a light bulb to use it. Yuck. Though only when using Apple-supplied stuff. If I treated OS X like I treat(ed) Windows -- running programs from third parties whenever possible -- it might just be rendered tolerable. That's what I'm leaning toward right now.
That does bring up another issue: what programs will I need to find replacements for? Right now I suspect I'd need to replace Nedit (tabbed text editor that I can set the colors on), X-chat (x-chat aqua evidently isn't really ready, dagnabbit), Pidgin (formerly gaim). And I'd need these programs to all let me set their colors and not just use the OS non-choice(s).
At least I wouldn't be stuck using Safari (which has the same locked-in color idiocy as OS X itself) since Opera is available for OS X. Though evidently I'd need to tell OS X to get out of the way and let the keys do the things I expect them to so. F12 means "open the Opera quick menu" and not whatever goofy (and as I recall, utterly useless) thing OS X does with it, to me.
I suppose the choice should be whichever one involves the least amount of cussing. No, Mr. Jobs, that does not make #3 automatic. If only Woz had been around to make sure the configuration tools that ought to be there were included...
It is quite frustrating. The MacBook looks seems like a great thing, but only almost.
Aww, crap.
10 November 2007 15:25I'm finally installing Wolvix 1.1.0 on the laptop, after getting the latest GParted beta and repartitioning the laptop drive. All that is going slow, but it is going. And the Wolvix LiveCD even found a neighbor's unsecured wireless network and connected without my having to tweak anything.
I also tried Xubuntu. Or rather I tried to try it, and found it wouldn't boot. Evidently I have the hardware that reveals a nasty kernel bug in the latest Ubuntu. So much for trying that.
But the real downer is that I went looking to see if anyone managed to get the Cisco Aironet 350 working with WPA under Linux. Nobody has. A few, at least, have tried. Including a network engineer who knows from Linux and Cisco. Evidently the Aironet can do WPA if it has very recent firmware. Firmware that evidently doesn't work with the Linux driver, but only with the @$&! Windows driver... which doesn't work under ndiswrapper. Which means the card is not sufficiently supported to be fully useful. It's good enough for hotels and such, but that's it.
Anyone know of a wireless card (PCMCIA) with the following characteristics?:
1. Works under Linux natively (no ndiswrapper games).
2. Does WPA right out of the box.
3. Is inexpensive.
It looks like I get to go hunting for such a thing.
It's PCLinuxOS.
4 July 2007 20:51I tried PCLinuxOS on belgian and ran into the very same error as I did with Kubuntu. This time, though, there was a "safe boot" option which worked. Researching just what that did led me to the solution for both Kubuntu and PCLinuxOS: turning off APIC. That left me wondering if should give Kubuntu a shot after all.
A few things shot that idea down. Xubuntu started acting flaky on percheron and it seemed that the screensaver, of all things, was the thing causing the lock-up. Using Kubuntu I found that the default KDE settings were annoying which is not a show stopper but is a minor irritant. Also, Kubuntu wouldn't shut down nicely when running from LiveCD.
I decided to give Linux Mint a try. Mint is a variant of Ubuntu and supposedly fixed a few things. Evidently they were fixed in the veterinary sense as I could not get Mint to boot on belgian (kernel panic) or on percheron (blank screen hangs - even with the 'safe video' option). So as nice as Mint might sound, it's right out.
PCLinuxOS comes right up, only stopping to ask some very reasonable questions (time zone, preferred network settings) and it also shuts down cleanly. KDE is the window manager, but the defaults have been changed to be non-annoying (no silly bouncing icons and fading effects). PCLOS also has the various codecs already included. I can view youtube videos while running the LiveCD, for example. Also, once the hard drive was mounted I could view saved videos even if they were .wmv files. The only problem is that it's just a bit too eager - simply highlighting a file in Konqueror causes the audio to play.
Letting PCLOS run, it didn't lock up or doing anything weird. It does have synaptic for simple package management. There are some cases where things are not in the repository and an rpm must be applied directly. I'm not thrilled with rpm, but at least it's minimized. On Wolvix I still need to apply a .tgz and on Xubuntu I still need to apply a .deb at times, so this is hardly unique.
The PCLinuxOS installer is a bit awkward at the partitioning stage and I wound up using a GParted CD to handle partitioning and then telling PCLOS to use the existing partitions. It also took too long to figure out just how to get it to display at the correct resolution (set up the video card and tell it that I have 32M and not just 4M of video RAM) - unfortunately it's easy to not see the need to configure the card when the card selection is correct. I did have to spend some time getting it to recognize my external FireWire drive and I'm not entirely happy with the solution. It recognizes the drive but KDiskFree forgets it exists as soon as it is unmounted and the HAL setup doesn't give me a desktop icon. Desktop icons are things I normally do not like, but for removable devices they are actually useful. I still have to figure out how to get Opera to use Nedit for viewing source as Nedit needs some help due some weird display issue. I recall having that problem before, but I've since lost the solution. I also need to tweak the color a scheme a bit more. I already did, but I was in such a hurry to away from the wretched retina-searing white-hot backgrounds that I probably made things just a bit too dark.
Despite all that, most things work right off and quite well. Having synaptic is a big win and something rpm-based distributions should have had long ago. It is also so nice to not have to fiddle with codecs. They're there and they just work. I installed Opera and Flash worked right off. Kaffeine can even play .flv files. Audacity could save .mp3 files right off. So far I haven't found a file type that could not be displayed.
I started out with Mandrake and then moved to Fedora Core and now I'm sort of back. PCLinuxOS is a Mandriva (Mandrake merged with Connectiva some time back and became Mandriva) derivative. It does feel familiar and I think that's more than just from having KDE as the window manager.
Last night I did a backup of the data on belgian in preparation for installing Kubuntu (7.04, "Feisty Fawn") on that machine. I didn't go farther than the backup last night, wanting to pause a while and be sure of things. This morning I figured it was time to actually do it.
Well, *ubuntu is not going on belgian. *ubuntu 7.04 ("Feisty Fawn"), is, as far as I am concerned too broken to bother with. Although I am running Xubuntu 7.04 on percheron right now, that matters not.
While 7.04 has a couple issues I am aware of, they are not show stoppers in themselves. GIMP relies on libexif for jpg files and the version that 7.04 uses is too old to work right for some image made by newer cameras, such as the one Jay now uses. I discovered that to get K3B to do normalizing of audio I'd need to compile normalize-audio myself. But the problem is not these nuisances. The problem is that 7.04 won't install:
I have tried booting the Kubuntu LiveCD and it stumbles and throws an error: /bin/sh can't access tty; job control mode off.
I've tried booting with a Xubuntu LiveCD and get the same thing.
I've tried several of the supposed work-arounds. They don't work.
I've downloaded the "alternate" Ubuntu install ISO and tried that. The text install gets farther but then says it can't find the network interface.
Just to check, I tried Xubuntu 6.10 ("Edgy Eft") and that came up just fine. There is nothing special about belgian's hardware. So Edgy works, but I'm not going to install a version behind and I'm not going to install a version behind and then hope an upgrade doesn't break things the same way the LiveCD fails. Since 6.10 just works, it's plain that 7.04 is broken.
So, I'm giving up on what should have been named "Flaky Fawn." That leaves me with a problem. What do I install on belgian? If Wolvix 1.1.0 was released rather than a "release candidate" (with known problems) I'd be seriously tempted to go with it. Wolvix has the most recent libexif so GIMP can handle jpgs made by new Olympus cameras, so at least that wouldn't be an issue. And even now Wolvix boots on belgian without any special hand-holding.
I could keep using Fedora for a while longer and hope that Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" isn't "Goofy Gibbon" in disguise and actually works. Or stay with Fedora and wait for Wolvix. Or even try something else entirely, expecting to change again within the year. Staying with Fedora isn't very appealing, but I'm not sure what I'd replace it with even if only temporarily.
I'm still considering what to replace Fedora Core with. There is the new Fedora which supposedly is a bit more usable, but likely still has the silly codec issues. And there is Ubuntu which has a very good ease of use, overall. There is Freespire which is now Ubuntu based and supposedly has no codec problems. There is also Wolvix, which is a customized version of Slackware.
( Musings and such )
Now I'm torn. I want to like Ubuntu, and I'm leery of running a Slackware based distribution as my main system. Yet it seems that if something needs to work, Wolvix lets me get the job done and Ubuntu... seems to get in the way. Now, it may be I was rushing and just wanted the problem fixed NOW and didn't use some Debianesque tool that would have taken care of things as I've avoided Debian style systems until Ubuntu. Of course, I could run Ubuntu and still have Wolvix around as I have two computers in the office. I have both now, but it's dual-boot so I can use one or the other at any given time. Decisive, aren't I?
