40 posts tagged “computer”

In recent weeks I've undertaken the grotesque task of completely reinstalling my entire Slackware Linux OS on BlackFlame, moving from a very customized 10.1 distro up to 12.2, including a custom kernel and installing KDE 4.2.3 from slackware-current. It's been an "interesting" experience thus far. Thankfully I have seen obvious improvements with the system- including finally getting my almost-2-year-old SB "X-Fi" XtremeAudio (ca0106) card finally working alongside my 10-year-old SBLive! Value card. But thankfully improvements in ATI's fglrx, or "Catalyst" driver have made getting my video card (Radeon 9800 Pro) up and running properly much easier on my stress levels than they did 4 years ago. I had dual screen xinerama, hardware accelerated graphics the first night! Not 4 months down the road like it was back then.

Still- I thought the jump to KDE 4.2.3 (from 3.4) would be much more, I guess, 'animated', like Vista or MacOS are. In that sense I feel a little disappointed. At the same time, however, there are still kinks in my graphics config that I need to work out. XComposite and XDamage- two X.org modules necessary to enable things like transparency, still aren't working, and it appears that xinerama is the reason why. I've tried disabling xinerama, but in doing so, reduces KDE to only one screen of the two- and even then the modules didn't seem to work.
The oher disappointment was how sluggish KDE 4 feels, specifically in terms of the plasma widgets on the desktop. Changing virtual desktops often took a while (a few seconds) to do. It wasn't a modern, snappy, desktop- it felt like Windows 95.

Tonight though, I stumbled across a gem that seems to have made a significant difference on how 'snappy' the desktop feels. This link: http://www.bramschoenmakers.nl/en/node/549

That site links to yet another site that discusses speedup options for Radeon video cards using KDE 4.2. They are simply device options to be placed inside the Device section of the xorg.conf file.

In short:

KDE seems more responsive- which cascades down to Firefox and my Windows XP VM too. I haven't tried anything 3D or FMV yet- but from what I'm seeing on my system thus far, I have high hopes.

Still have to deal with transparency- but I'm sure that will come in time too.

570. That's how many emails I have sitting on various email servers that I have yet to download to my desktop.
Why? Late last year I decided that I was going to change up my email strategy and teach myself how to setup and administer a small personal email server using a combination of Postfix, Dovecot and a few other open-source apps that would retrieve my mail off those servers and 'host' them off my 'server'- allowing me to access all my email across my personal VPN using IMAP so I don't have to worry about synchronizing folders and whatnot. It was a great idea at the time- and when I came up with it, there was still "plenty of time" left in the year so I could continue to archive my email according to year (yes, I'm one of those people that doesn't delete ANY emails- except spam), and start fresh with this new strategy as of Jan 1, 2009.

Jan 1, 2009 has since long gone by and I still find myself unable to get around to setting my email system up the way I see fit. I simply can't find the time! As it is I'm trying to juggle a good 5-6 major tasks, and learning Postfix and Dovecot, among others, just doesn't fit into the timeframe these days. Webmail has become a very good friend of mine lately as a result.
I'll get to it one day- but like all my other proverbial balls in the air right now- it tends to be taking 3-4x longer to complete than I think it should (more specifically- 3-4x longer than it would have taken me 5-10 years ago. I'm having a very serious problem with this 'aging' thing).

And as for my network media strategy... I won't even go there. I know there is open-source software that will allow me to stream my music and video over my network and/or VPN so I can view it on my XBOX 360- and again, I'll get to it one day....

Oh look! It's now up to 571!

Firefox 3

Earlier this year I gave up using Firefox 2.x until version 3.0 was released. 3.0 supposedly came with the 'promise' of stability and serious bugfixes- like the famous Firefox memory leak.

Now, I'm almost ready to give Firefox a hiatus yet again. I've gone through and performed every tweak I can find online for the browser to optimize it, but there are just some things I can't overlook much longer:

Admittedly, I push my browsers HARD. Ange counted my open tabs in (one of my two instances of) Firefox last night: 74. And that's on my personal browser. My Development browser contains MUCH more- easily over 100.

The Memory Leak:
It has NOT been fixed. Firefox continues to eat up my 2GB of RAM if left open too long, and if I don't catch it in time, it begins to feast on my swap partition. If I don't catch THAT in time, my systems seize. Granted, 74 tabs open in one browser, over 100 in another, and both instances running at the same time. Obviously the browser has some serious memory requirements. But why do those pages HAVE to remain in memory? Why can't they be swapped in and out depending on the frequency of their use?

Flash
Despite my previous posts praising Flash 10, I have since reverted back to Flash 9 due to some serious stability issues. Flash 10 worked fine for a bit- when it was good, it was good. But as soon as something went wrong, it collapsed the browser (and the system itself) in a horrible demonstration of destruction and chaos. Flash 9 isn't without it's own problems, but right now, it's the lesser of two evils.

The 'Close Browser' Bug
As mentioned before, I have a LOT of tabs open in my browser. Some of which stick around for months at a time. Firefox 3 introduced a dedicated "Save & Close" command upon closing the browser to allow you to save your browser session as-is so you don't have to go and re-open everything the next time you start it up. This is more of a problem on my laptop, SpitFire, as I tend to lug it around between the office and home every day- and since my battery is fried (that's another story), leaving it on for the 'commute' isn't an option, so I close everything down for transport.
The problem, though, is that if there is another 'auxiliary' browser window open- for example, the 'Downloads' window that displays your current/recent downloads- and you close your main browser window before closing that extra window (this also happens on pop-ups), your entire session is discarded.
Admittedly, when you go to close the main browser, you do get a warning message. But the warning message and the 'Save & Close' message windows look almost identical, except for the fact that on one, the button you click to proceed says "Save & Close" and the other says "Close Tabs". And when it's 1:30am after having stared at a computer monitor for the past 10+ hours, you can easily mistake which is which. That happened last night- and now all my browser tabs on my laptop are gone. Yes, I could go into my history to see what I had, but that's a lot more work than I'm prepared to put in.

Improper Shutdowns
Similar to the memory leak- or perhaps part of it, is the problem of improper shutdowns and 'ghost' processes. There have been plenty of times where I close all my browsers (usually with a 'killall' command), but my memory usage stays high. Looking at the process list, there are a few Firefox processes that just don't die, and are unaffected by 'killall', so you need to explicitly kill them individually with their pid. It sucks and is very frustrating, especially if the memory leak has consumed most of your RAM and swap, bringing your system to a crawl where keystrokes alone take 5-10 seconds to register, let alone executing a command.
I don't know why this happens for sure- but it might have something to do with...

Acrobat Reader
Yet another quality offering by Adobe for Linux! Opening a PDF and having Firefox use Acrobat reader to open it is a disaster waiting to happen. In all honestly, even running Acrobat independently of the browser (opening a PDF on the local system) can cause problems too (though the latest version seems to be okay- for now). There are all sorts of messages on forums and blogs touching on this (and many of the above) problem, but none seem to have a solution that doesn't involve waiting for the next version of either Firefox or Acrobat.

High CPU Forenzics
This isn't really a problem, so much as a feature wish. Often times, one of the sites in my 74 tabs, will go erratic and start hogging the CPU, causing things to slow down. Likely this is a problem with bad Javascript or Flash anyways, but it happens regardless. Looking at the process list, I see that Firefox is indeed using the CPU, but there is no way to know exactly which tab/page is causing the CPU to overwork itself, short of closing down suspected tabs and hoping for the best.

What to do, what to do. The last time I gave up on Firefox, I went to Seamonkey and had great success- none of the problems that plagued Firefox seemed to be a factor in Seamonkey, but it does lack from the same 'flair' that Firefox has. Seamonkey just 'feels' like Netscape Navigator 4.0.
Opera is a good browser too- but it too just seems 'foreign' to a certain degree. Perhaps moreso, the bigger problem lies in it's web development tools. That is, there aren't any (or many). As a web developer, I have come to live and die by my 'Web Developer' toolbar in Firefox, not to mention the color eyedropper tool, the measurement tool, various debugging tools (Firebug), etc. Opera just doesn't have add-ons that can compete with those. I suppose for development, Firefox might still fit the bill, but personal browsing could go to Opera in the meantime.

Regardless, it seems to me that Firefox is beginning to go down the same road as Internet Explorer in terms of stability and performance. IMO, Firefox has been on a downward slow since version 1.0.6 (which was a dream to use). Hopefully they are able to turns things around with the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1.

(I had a passing thought this morning, went to post it on Twitter, but because of the lame 140-character limit, it didn't fit there- so I'll post it here instead.)

"Closed-source (aka 'Purchased') software makes me use it the way THEY want me to use it.
Open-source software allows me to use it the way I want to use it."

Tux

I've been running Slackware as my Linux distribution of choice for years. I've used other distros like Red Hat/Fedora, Debian, etc., in the past- and while they're good, I still come back to Slackware.

Slackware is said to be the "most Unix-like" of all the Linux distros- and I agree with that. No pretty hold-your-hand graphical installation programs here- it's all text-based, and all settings are done by editing text files from the command-line. Most Windows users would curl up in a ball in the corner of the room if they saw just how "un-under-friendly" Slackware really is.
But I come from the DOS days of computers- where editing text files and writing Batch scripts was the norm- and that's why I take so well to Slackware. It gives me the opportunity to understand the inner-workings of every single piece of my systems, and fix problems accordingly.

This morning I was browsing through the distribution comparisons on distrowatch.com, and came across this blurb about Slackware:

"There is a saying in the Linux community that if you learn Red Hat, you'll know Red Hat, but if you learn Slackware, you'll know Linux."

I've never heard this saying before- but I like it, and I stand by it. It's not to say a distro like Fedora can't allow you to 'know Linux' in the same way- but it certainly holds your hand a lot more.
Admittedly, I started with Slackware when I first decided to try Linux back in my college days over 10 years ago (*cringe*- God I feel old), expecting the 'Slack' part to mean you didn't need to know the OS indepth- that it was meant for 'Slack'ers, and would do much of the hard stuff for you. That couldn't be any further from the truth. Almost 10 years ago, I installed Red Hat 5 (I think) on a new home system- dual-booted alongside Windows 98, and that enabled me to learn a lot more about Linux. Over time, as I felt more comfortable with it, I eventually went back to Slackware to challenge my Linux skills- and, more importantly, advance them. I haven't looked back since.
Sure, applying updates on Fedora or Ubuntu using a graphical program is easy- but to download the sources and compile them from-scatch, using optimizations unique to your own system, really forces you to take control of your computer system, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

Slackware - For The Real Nerds

Caught this on Slashdot/Gizmodo/TechEBlog/....

Seems that one of the computers running the elaborate visual show on the 'roof' of the Olympic Stadium in Beijing during the Opening Ceremony last week had a hiccup- resulting in a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).

Beijing 2008 Opening Ceremony BSOD #1

Beijing 2008 Opening Ceremony BSOD #2

Beijing 2008 Opening Ceremony BSOD #3

Tonight I opted to do a little more thorough testing of the memory used in BlackFlame after discovering over 100 errors while running memtest86 yesterday. So while watching Game 4 of the Flames-Sharks playoff series, I hauled out the beast and began.

The plan: Remove the new 'Patriot' memory stick from the system, leaving the previous two Kingston sticks in to ensure the Kingstons haven't gone corrupt on me (after all, they've been active almost non-stop since 2005).
Then, remove the Kingstons from the equation and test the Patriot stick on it's own.

My Hypothesis: The Kingstons would render no errors, the Patriot would produce errors after a while.

The Results? Exactly what I expected. After 47 minutes of memtest86 running on the Kingston sticks alone- no errors were reported. Since it was after the 35 minute mark of yesterdays test that errors began appearing, I figured 47 minutes into the test was probably safe to declare them 'working'.

I popped the Patriot stick in- even used a different memory slot than what it was previously sitting in. Within seconds of running memtest86, I had dozens of errors flood my screen.

I only bought this RAM 11 days ago from a local computer shop who has really made a name for themselves in Calgary. But their policies are a bit of a gray area I find. As the company has grown, I've found they have begun to adopt more of a 'big box retailer' attitude, including introducing their own 'Performance Plan' add-on services not unlike those found at places like Best Buy.
I did not buy the 'performance plan' service when I bought the memory. And the only mention I see on their invoice and website about returns or exchanges is simply: 'no returns of exchanges after 7 days'. I'm clearly over 7 days- and without having purchased their 'performance plan', I'm just expecting to have to put up a fight with them over this.

Quite simply- I don't want this 'Patriot' memory. I want to exchange it for a stick of Kingston. When it comes to computer parts for my own systems, I adopt a very strict 'one-strike-and-you're-out' policy. I run my hardware HARD, and if a manufacturer can't produce a product to keep up- then it doesn't deserve to be part of my rig. Period.
Patriot memory has struck out faster than any other part I've ever had to replace on my systems, so I don't want a new stick of Patriot- I want something that has a proven track record, and for me, that is Kingston.

But how much battle will I have to wage in order to get my way from this local retailer? Time will tell I suppose- though already I haven't heard back from them regarding my exchange request, so I'm not really expecting much from them at this point.

My parade of tech problems appears to have no immediate end in sight.
Now that my network is 'working' (to acceptable levels- still going back and forth with D-Link as to why my Nintendo DS can't get a connection speed any faster than a paltry 2Mbps), it seems that both the PVR and 'BlackFlame' have decided to be 'sick' now too.

The PVR, I suspect a hard drive issue. Nothing that has been recorded actually contains any data- just a black screen. We can no longer 'rewind' live TV either. How pathetic- just goes to show the true level of quality put into consumer electronics today.

BlackFlame's issue seems to be with the recently-installed RAM upgrade. I'm usually a stickler for certain brands. I've used Kingston memory in all my systems up to, and including, this one. So whatever possessed me to accept a stick of 'Patriot' RAM really did me a disservice. Things have been randomly crashing as of late- sometimes Firefox (still running 3.0b3- which I know is buggy, which doesn't help the situation obviously. Yes I know there have been releases since then- but that's an entirely other ball of wax I don't want to get into right now), sometimes parts of KDE, sometimes my entire X session!
Tonight I ran a test on the system RAM using 'memtest86'- a program I've trusted for many years. Within 30 minutes of the test beginning, the screen began to fill with red error messages indicating corrupt bits. A mere 45 minutes after the test began, memtest86 had counted 110 memory errors- all of which were in the higher area of memory- which belongs to the new 'Patriot' RAM.

Bad Memory

As of now, Firefox unstable to the point it's unusable- so I've resorted to using Mozilla Seamonkey in the meantime. Truth be told- after some of the recent discoveries with Firefox 3, I may be jumping ship to Seamonkey indefinitely.

I've been sick all this week. I started feeling it Monday afternoon, and by that night I was well into the throes of illness. Ange caught it too- in fact, we started feeling the symptoms at about the same time on Monday, so we've at least been able to suffer through it together. The only difference is that she still has to go to work, whereas I have the freedom to stay home and rest- and rest I did.
Unfortunately, after 4 days, I have yet to really begin to feel like I'm on the road to recovery. I actually don't feel all that terrible- but being sick around those who simply can't afford to be sick at this time of year has kept me in my own personal quarantine all week.
So this afternoon we decided to get out for a bit. I picked Ange up from work and we were off for an afternoon full of chores- but not bad chores.

Ange's laptop has slowly continued to rot. The DVD drive is completely unusable, and more recently, the wireless network card rendered itself completely unusable- it connects to my network, but at a paltry speed of 1Mbps, even when less than 2 feet from the wi-fi access point itself. A far cry from the expected 54Mbps.
So I backed up all the data to BlackFlame (using a cabled network connection) and took it back to Best Buy to cash in on our purchased 'performance plan'.
Browsing forums the past few days has revealed that the wi-fi problem seems to be a near-epidemic problem with this line of HP Pavilion laptops (Ange's was a model dv6000). And it's not a Windows problem- it's a hardware problem. Often times the motherboard needs to be completely replaced. I know plenty of people who have bought HP laptops similar to this one in recent months. I presume it's only a matter of time before their wireless network connections begin to crap out as well.

BlackFlame Upgrade

I decided to do a little self-tech support of my own with my workstation/server, BlackFlame. Nothing serious needed to be done- but my lone 1GB of RAM has become a performance hinderance lately- especially running both Linux and a Windows XP VM (virtual machine) concurrently. I added another 1GB stick of RAM to the system to bring it up to a more acceptable 2GB. I was a little weary about the upgrade since I've read mixed things about the memory setup on my motherboard. But the memory took to it like a fish to water with no problems whatsoever, and the performance difference has been very noticable thus far.
I also replaced my CMOS battery on my motherboard. Sometime last year, the battery died- and I've simply been dragging my feet to replace it. It hasn't been a real pain- but in the few cases where I've had to power-down the system, I've been forced to reconfigure my CPU speed and memory configuratation from (my) memory. I put an end to that tonight too, or rather, Ange did since her hands are small enough to get into the tight space and hold onto the quarter-sized battery. My big ape-like hands probably would have done significantly more damage.

Mario Kart Wii Preordered!

While I was out picking up dinner and a CMOS battery (just a typical Friday night outing for a computer geek)- I stopped by my local EB Games store... just to see if they were open. I decided that if they were, I'd pop in and reserve my copy of Mario Kart Wii. Sure enough- the doors were open, so I proceeded to reserve me a copy... and an extra Wii Wheel for an extra $10! (somehow I imagine I'll be picking up a few others shortly after launch as well).
There are a few games that I'd honestly love to pick up and go through right now- including Rainbow Six Vegas 2, and the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 4. But I figured when it came right down to it- I don't have the kind of time to put into a game like GTA4 or even Vegas 2- but Mario Kart is always something quick and fun you can pick up and play for 20 minutes at a time and still make some progress through it. That's the beauty of Wii, really. While developers for XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 are hell-bent on creating 'epic' games that essentially require you to quit your job and give up food and sleep in order to get through them in a decent degree of time- Nintendo continues to stick to the idea that games should be just that: games, not 'epic' adventures or a form of virtual reality. Don't get me wrong- I still enjoy my 360 and the games on it- but in the past year the Wii has clearly received the bulk of my gaming dollar. And why? Because they're simple to pick up and understand- and most of all: they're genuinely fun.

OMFGZ!!!!!1!!1!!1 Someone has a strong, fast, wide-open wireless hotspot available here in 'the valley'. It popped up while booting my laptop tonight after getting in from a grueling trip along Highway 93. There were several near-whiteout conditions along the way. People were pulling off to the side, opting to wait it out- while the rest of us trudged on at no more than 30 km/h. Sheesh.

But we made it in one piece- and have been rewarded with free Internet for the weekend.
The laptops seem to connect just fine. The DS can 'see' the hotspot, but fails to connect to Nintendo WFC. Haven't tried the Wii yet (yes, we brought some of the 'toys')

Seems I'll be fragging fireside sooner than I thought.....
*bwahaha*