CS101 Contest Visual Representation - First Pass

Here's the output, as of today. Since overlapping windows trash the graphical display, the text window is not full size. (My netbook has only 1024x600 resolution.)

Stop Defacing Library Books!

I was sitting in the public library, reading a book from their collection, when I ran across this:

How wrong can you get? Defacing library books is petty vandalism, even for members of the self-appointed spelling and grammar police. What’s worse is that the book is correct as written; the “correction” is totally wrong. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, exorcised means "To clear (a person or place) of evil spirits; to purify or set free from malignant influences." There were no evil spirits around; the king was so displeased ("exercised") about the path the river might take that he had it diverted to remain in China. Do us all a favor, and read without a pencil.

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.