November Status Report

In no particular order:

• I trashed my Windows Vista partition, which I was not using, and installed CentOS 6. Why CentOS 6?  I want to run XILINX ISE WebPACK, which can run on Linux, but is only certified to run on RHEL this version and Suse Linux Enterprise that version. I have a board with a Xilinx part on it, and I want to play with it. Rather than screwing around with my default Ubuntu desktop box to get Xilinx to work (it's supposed to be possible), I decided to install the nearest thing to RHEL around: CentOS. My intention is to make an "engineering workstation" type system, like my old Sun workstation that I used on the job.
• CentOS 6 has it's quirks. Red Hat uses a program called prelink to (try to) speed up the system. YMMV, as they say. What it does do, and does very well, is trash Dropbox, an online file storage provider. Dropbox is currently  important in my life because I store  my notes on it. I do love my notes. Prelink does a good job of prelinking things that should not ever be prelinked. To tell prelink to cut it out, you have to edit the file /etc/prelink.conf and blacklist the program being trashed. Yup. The prelink guys want you to opt out, not opt in. I give them credit for being so inclusive. For a program like Dropbox, blacklisting can be an iterative process. You think you have it fixed, but then Dropbox gets trashed again, so you have to tweak your blacklist... again.The magic temporary fix is sudo yum reinstall dropbox dropbox-nautilus, which will at least temporarily give you back Dropbox. (Yeah, I enabled sudo. Just shoot me, I come in peace, from Debian. Sorta, kinda.) I think that I have the proper blacklisting sorted out, but only time will tell. 

For the record, here's the lines I added to /etc/prelink.conf to blacklist Dropbox:
-b dropbox*
-b dbcli*
We'll see how this works out in the long run. Yesterday when I booted CentOS 6, Dropbox was still working, and all is in harmony.

• The GUI based package manager, which is based on PackageKit and YUM,  is slower than cooking Irish oatmeal. I have no idea why. Running yum from the command line does not seem too slow, so it has to be something with how they're updating/searching/building the local package database. For the record, synaptic and APT seem much faster. 
• Of course Ubuntu has the annoying apt-xapian-index thing going on...  very annoying. See:

High CPU Usage on Ubuntu By update-apt-xapi Process (Note that you have to fix the /etc/cron.daily/apt file as well as the /etc/cron.weekly/apt-xapian-index file. Ubuntu belives in wearing  both a belt and suspenders braces.)

•  I did a fresh install for my Ubuntu system. I went from 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" to 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot". Supposedly they have improved the wonderful, shiny new Unity user interface. I tried it (again); it's still not what I'm looking for. No surprise. I fixed this with a sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop kupfer and life is beautiful again.
• Ubuntu 11.10 has packages for a complete GNU gcc toolchain, including hardware debugging,  for a TI MSP430 target. In theory one would not have to ever build the friggen' thing again. In practice, the gdb-msp430 package will not install:

E: /var/cache/apt/archives/gdb-msp430_7.2~mspgcc-7.2-20110612-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb: trying to overwrite '/usr/share/gdb/python/gdb/__init__.py', which is also in package gdb 7.3-0ubuntu2

The bug is already in the Ubuntu launchpad bug tracker.  

• Another problem with an official Ubuntu package for a MSP430 toolchain is that an official package will follow the Debian standard for where files go: executable binaries go in something like /usr/bin, libraries in something like /usr/lib, and so forth. The toolchain is scattered through your system, albeit in a logical way. This may make using Eclipse's C/C++ Cross Compiler Support  and C/C++ GDB Hardware Debugging plugins a pain to use. One reason I like Eclipse is it gives you a GUI type debugger in Linux. I do so like to point and click...

Note the handy Eclipse configuration form, found under Project --> Properties --> C/C++ Build --> Settings, at least on my system. It's trying hard to make your life easier. Really. I think that Eclipse is assuming that you have the whole the cross compiler toochain stored in one location, such as /usr/local/foo or /opt/bar. If you can give it a valid prefix, such as msp-430- or arm-none-eabi-, and a valid path to the toolchain's executables, such as /opt/msp430/bin or /opt/CodeSourcery/Sourcery_G++_Lite/bin, your life will be much easier because you will have fewer wonderful Eclipse form boxes to fill out. This may work for putting your executable binary things in /usr/bin, and the rest of the files somewhere in the file system. I don't know. If someone fixes the gdb-msp430 package I'll find out. My preference is too keep all the toolchains separate, but if everything plays nicely and I don't have to build the mspgcc toochain ever again, I'll be happy.

Hey, it's October!

Atop the lighthouse at Whitefish Bay

At Whitefish Bay, Michigan

Hmm, I've been a bit inactive as of late. It's time to update the blog...

Ken and I "Said Yah to Da UP, Eh!" and made a lightning strike to Whitefish Point, Michigan (aka "The Graveyard of Ships"). This is the site of a working lighthouse and the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, among other things. From Chicago, it's a very long ride in the country, at times on rural roads with, at most, one destination sign. (I believe that the locals think that road signs are optional. If you don't know where the road goes, why the hell would you want to travel it, ya stupid fudgie?) The "Edmund Fitzgerald"  that Gordon Lightfoot sings about sank near this place, and every year there a memorial service is held at the museum. The recovered bell from the Big Fitz is rung 29 times, once for each crew member. A replacement bell, inscribed with names of the the crew, was installed on the wreck. We also passed through Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and saw the Soo Locks in action, visited the museum ship Steamship Valley Camp (very cool) and went to the top of the Tower of History. We had a great time.

Mackinaw Bridge

Something else great about Michigan: where I come from, a party store sells things such as paper hats and decorated napkins; in Michigan, a party store sells all varieties of  booze. The heck with paper hats! They folks really know how to party! Yowza! I celebrated this diversity by purchasing a variety of beers and some legal, 125 proof  moonshine. A few of the beers and the moonshine made it back home intact. I haven't cracked the hooch open yet, but I'll get around to it.

Moonshine

Interesting to note: my wife's two brothers, both alumnae of Ole_Miss, were unable to hook me up with moonshine in Mississippi. They claimed no knowledge of such things, the sissies. I had to console myself with Stoli while I was down south. I'll tell you one thing, the great thing about Mississippi is that for greater efficiency, beer is sold in gas stations and convenience stores instead of liquor stores. It sure sped things up for me!  I'm not sure what a party store is in Mississippi. Maybe that's where you can buy a lap dance or something.

Like all good tourists, we purchased a crapload of fudge and postcards, ate a pastie, and ran out of gas on the interstate. On the journey home, I survived on a balanced diet of non-Chicago hot dogs with mustard and V8 juice. I'm more or less still alive, but I really need eat some greens.

A few photos:

The lighthouse at Whitefish Bay

Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum

View from the Lighthouse

Re: Unity Desktop Environment nonresponsive with GeForce 7300 LE...

Re: Unity Desktop Environment nonresponsive with GeForce 7300 LE...

---

 

Aw, snap! I thought everything was groovy, but I was wrong. I posted this elsewhere...

 

Sorry, it's not fixed. My mistake, there still seem to be some problems.

I found this in the Debian User Forums:

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=65539 "Lost 3D after updating nvidia-glx, linux and X".

Someone advised reinstalling the following packages:

libegl1-mesa_7.10.2-3_i386.deb
libglu1-mesa_7.10.2-3_i386.deb
libegl1-mesa-drivers_7.10.2-3_i386.deb
xserver-xephyr_1.10.2-1_i386.deb
libgl1-mesa-dri_7.10.2-3_i386.deb
xserver-xorg-core_1.10.2-1_i386.deb
libgl1-mesa-glx_7.10.2-3_i386.deb

I reinstalled the Ubuntu amd64 equivalents:

(libegl1-mesa) <- not on my system
libglu1-mesa
(libegl1-mesa-driver) <- not on my system
xserver-xephyr
libgl1-mesa-dri
xserver-xorg-core
libgl1-mesa-glx

Two of these packages, libegl1-mesa and libegl1-mesa-driver, are not installed and don't seem to be needed.

After banging in these packages, Ubuntu boots and loads Unity-2D. I mistook Unity-2D for regular unity, and thought "problem solved". My mistake.

I am currently using nVidia driver 275.09.07, installed from NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-275.09.07.run.

The unity support test now results in a failure and loads unity-2d on my system.

mikey@hatshepsut:~/Downloads$ /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p
OpenGL vendor string: Mesa Project
OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.10.2

Not software rendered: no
Not blacklisted: yes
GLX fbconfig: yes
GLX texture from pixmap: no
GL npot or rect textures: yes
GL vertex program: yes
GL fragment program: yes
GL vertex buffer object: yes
GL framebuffer object: yes
GL version is 1.4+: yes

Unity supported: no

Unity DE is now Working as Well As Can Be Expected

 Happy, happy, joy, joy

See the next day's post.

I posted this elsewhere:


[FIXED] Re: Unity Desktop Environment nonresponsive with GeForce 7300 LE...


Short answer: not a nVidia driver problem.


I found a fix, at least for my system, in the Debian User Forums:


http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=65539 "Lost 3D after updating nvidia-glx, linux and X".


Someone advised reinstalling the following packages:

libegl1-mesa_7.10.2-3_i386.deb

libglu1-mesa_7.10.2-3_i386.deb

libegl1-mesa-drivers_7.10.2-3_i386.deb

xserver-xephyr_1.10.2-1_i386.deb

libgl1-mesa-dri_7.10.2-3_i386.deb

xserver-xorg-core_1.10.2-1_i386.deb

libgl1-mesa-glx_7.10.2-3_i386.deb

I reinstalled the Ubuntu amd64 equivalents:

libegl1-mesa <-------- Not installed or needed on my system.

libglu1-mesa

libegl1-mesa-driver <- Not installed or needed on my system.

xserver-xephyr

libgl1-mesa-dri

xserver-xorg-core

libgl1-mesa-glx

Two of these packages, libegl1-mesa and libegl1-mesa-driver, WERE NOT installed on my system after the upgrade to natty (Ubuntu 11.04). I don't know why they weren't installed during the upgrade, or if they were there before the upgrade. They seem to be needed. (No, they are not.)


After banging in these packages, the Unity Desktop Environment works as well as can be expected. (Snarky comments removed.) Of course, I am running the nVidia 275.09.07 drivers instead of the ones in the Ubuntu repository...


A great Father's Day present for me! Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there.


I'm not a fan of the Unity DE, but it is nice to have my video working properly again.

My New Lubuntu Desktop

Big news from the home office in beautiful Skokie, IL: I have not been enjoying my Unity desktop environment experience very much. I am not alone is this.  In the past I have fixed other Ubuntu oddities such as the Aubergine barf color scheme and the placing and reordering of the window buttons on the top left, ala OS X. My solution to this whole Unity business is to switch to Lubuntu, which uses  LXDE. I call this the natty quick fix (NQF):

sudo apt get install lubuntu-desktop

Log out, then log in again into Lubuntu. Add other Lubuntu/LXDE packages as desired.

I put the bar up on the top, ala Gnome 2, added the Cairo Dock and found that Gnome-Do still works. I'm a happy, happy camper once again.

I can't complain too much, because you do not have to use Unity or Unity 2D. There are so many desktop environment/window manager options available from the standard repositories. I could even use Gnome 2 while it lasts, without adding a single package. (It's supposed to go away in the next release, but it's still available for now.)  That's a nice thing about Ubuntu: You can customize the heck out of it. There are a lot of other desktop options out there, options that will not kill my current installation. I do not want to reinstall at this time. There's KDE, XFCE4, LXDE, Window Maker, etc., all available for installation from the repository. I chose LXDE. Earlier, I tried it in a virtual machine and had a good experience. Now it's working well for me directly on hardware.

LXDE is supposed to be a lightweight desktop environment. but with all the crap I'm running on it, Conky shows a crapload of memory being used. (It's showing 1.48 GB being used right now, and all I'm doing is editing this blog post.) I'll look into that later. Right now life is too good.

My New Ubuntu Natty Wallpaper II

I felt creative after borking my system's video again. This time I was trying to get Unity working by down-reving  both my Xorg server and the proprietary nVidia video driver. All I I got for my efforts was a screen full of scrambled pixels.

Unity more or less works on my system if I use the open source Nouveau driver. (Other things break... the Nouveau driver 3D stuff is not ready for prime time.) I can also use the nVidia driver with Unity 2D, which is probably being improved even as I write. I'm not real crazy about the Unity desktop environment, 2D or otherwise. It seems to be a great leap backwards. I'm not sure why I don't deep six the whole fricking thing and move on. I must have too much time on my hands.

My New Ubuntu Natty Wallpaper

Dear Mr. Shuttleworth,

 I am having ever so much fun with the new Unity desktop. I felt so inspired by the spirit of unity that I created a new desktop wallpaper for my computer. It truly warms the cockles of my heart to beta test your wonderful software.

Cheers,

Mikey

I have the touch!

The poison touch, that is. The proverbial brown thumb. It's a reverse midas touch kind of power: everything I touch turns to crap.

It's  an awesome and mighty power. I have an uncanny ability to pick losers. Whatever I like, gets the spike. I liked the TV show Firefly. Canceled. FlashForward. Canceled.  My Name is Earl. Canceled. Yikes! No more TV for me.  I decided that I would wait a few years for the reruns to appear, and spend my time reading books and speaking in tongues to computers as a hobby, instead of watching TV. Although Hollywood heaved a very big sigh of relief, it's just too late for some.

Now writers must face my dangerous attentions. John Biggins was dropped by his publisher. He's self publishing on Amazon.com, poor guy. Even Neil Gaiman can't get R.A. Lafferty reprinted. (Good thing R.A. is now a blessed memory... he'd starve otherwise.) Earlier I reviewed Sara Vowell's book, The Wordy Shipmates, for Skokie Public Library's Winter Reading Whatever-a-thon. Hey, just shoot me, OK? I just wanted to win one of the prizes for my sweetie.

So, today I find in the "Buy Our Discarded Books for $1 Snack Zone Copy Center" section of the library... The Wordy Shipmates. The very copy that I checked out earlier this year and reviewed. With the purple X of death on its spine. The book was just published in 2008, and now in 2011 the library's already binning it for a buck. You know,  they still have Erle Stanley Gardiner books printed in 1955 on the shelf, but Sara Vowell gets the axe after three stinking years. I hope she has health insurance.

Screw it. I'm joining the Tea Party. They deserve me. There's just no way I'm going to the OTB, that's for sure.

Snow Day

The big storm has dropped a huge load of snow here in Skokie. I'm not sure I can open the front door -- there's a snowdrift  about 3-4 feet high in front of it. The back has a sliding door, so if I really want to go outside, I can. Earlier I heard children from next door outside, walking and playing with their dog. I started a pot of black beans with smoked turkey wings and sausage in the slow cooker, then did the crossword puzzle and the jumble. Then watched a couple ot TV shows on Hulu. The house smells great from the slowly cooking beans. It's now 12:38 PM; time to hit the showers.

Life is beautiful!

 

Dreaming in Chinese

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love and Language by Deborah Fallows

The author, a lady from the USA, lived in China for years, and writes about her experiences there. What's interesting about this book is she doesn't write much about tourist sites, cuisine or martial arts, but rather about what she learned about Chinese people and society while living in China while trying to learn Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua). She writes about getting a Chinese name, something that “would demonstrate that we weren't just here to flit around China, but intended to stick it out for a while.” Foreigners are given a name made of Chinese words that sound like their name in their native tongue. For example, Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (who wrote as Cordwainer Smith) became “Lin Bai-lo” (“Forest of Incandescent Bliss”). Alas, Deborah became “jie bi” “borrow a pen”, which just plain sucks. She correctly deep-sixed the bad name, and spent three years dodging it. There's a lot more about Chinese culture, society and language – a lot of Chinese language here – because it takes a lot of work for English speakers to dream in Chinese.

A Writer is Me!

In the Kingdom of Loathing, the Naughty Sorceress is no more. Outside of the Kingdom of Loathing lies the domain known as the real world. In that place I wrote a book review for the Skokie Public Library Winter Reading program. To my surprise, they put my review in the library's blog! Way cool, but sadly, they didn't correct my accidental truncation of the title. The correct title is The Wordy Shipmates. The librarians probably respect my words too much to edit them.

 

What Skokie is Reading

from The Bookshelf by Lynnanne

As part of our Winter Reading program, we are encouraging you readers to write your own reviews of books when you enter them on your reading log. Many readers have already contributed book reviews and, during the course of the Winter Reading program, we will share with you some of these wonderful reviews.
Today’s review is of The Wordy Shipmate by Sarah Vowell:

This book, written by a former contributing editor and consigliore of the radio show “This American Life”, is a fascinating, penetrating, personal and funny book about the Puritan settlers who emigrated to the New World to build a “city upon a hill”. Few authors could get me interested in the minutiae of Protestant theology, yet I found myself reading eagerly about things such as “the covenant of grace” and “the covenant of works”. Not to mention all the other goings on – banishments, cruel and unusual punishments, the conjoined church and state, wars with the Native Americans and a legion of strong personalities with serious differences of opinions and only a little tolerance. These people, their issues and the events surrounding them, still resonate today beyond the cans of baked beans available in every supermarket.
Click here to find out what Skokie is reading and reviewing and to register for the Winter Reading program.

Still Looking for the Key

I'm still pillaging my way through Loathing, looking for the last necessary key. Above is one of my consolation prizes:

The Best Meal of My Life Trophy

which you can earn by eating  60 White Citadel burgers, 10 orders of White Citadel fries, four Cherry Cloaca Colas and four Diet Cloaca Colas. 

I'm still waiting for the heart attack.

 

 

Chasing the Naughty Sorceress

The Naughty Sorceress from the Kingdom of Loathing

Back in the day (the day being sometime around 1974), I used to play a game called Dungeons and Dragons. I was an enthusiastic player for a number of years, until I wasn't. I lost interest, and so did my friends. The thrill was gone. I stopped playing role playing games, cold turkey. I moved on to other things, and so did most of my friends. I cast no more spells, and adventured underground no more. Orcs were safe in my presence, unless they were very annoying.

This has all changed. I now adventure again, in a place called  The Kingdom of Loathing. Don't ask me why, because I really don't know. I do know that I am in good company and having fun, so I'm just rolling with it. Last night I earned the "Right Tool for the Job" trophy by adventuring 100 times in the Haunted Bathroom of Spookyraven Manor armed with a Gnollish Autoplunger.

That's a  tool I could use in the real world. The toilet has been acting up, and my arm is getting tired using the old-fashioned regular old plunger. Sadly, Gnollish Autoplungers appear to be unavailable for ready money. Later tonight, you can find me looking for Boris's key, which is hidden somewhere in the Kingdom of Loathing. With that key, the Naughty Sorceress is toast! Yes indeed!