‘Til All Are One

I love Grease, don’t you? There’s some logic in the title. It is summer here in Australia, and as many may know Australian summers are typically very hot and dry. A lot has happened over the past few weeks and I’ve been too lazy to type it out here. I’ll split things into several entries for the sake of readability.

Back in July, I bought myself a nice new Athlon 2100+ system. This machine is lightyears ahead of my old Pentium II 350, and now I can do many things that wern’t practical on the old system. When I got the machine, I put it through a rigorous barrage of tests, including memtest86, heavy compiling and cpuburn. It passed with flying colours.

However, in the past couple of months, I’ve been having problems with heat. When I ran the tests, it was the middle of winter. Now it is summer, and room temperatures can easily hit 35 degrees or more. Using lm_sensors, I found that my CPU was about 70 degrees or more on a hot day - and that’s just at idle. If I tried compiling something or playing a game like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament, it would easily go past 85 degrees. This triggers the overheat protection system on my ASUS A7V333 motherboard to shut the computer down (an Athlon can only take 90 degrees before frying itself). I’ve been saved many times by that - had my motherboard not had that feature (most boards don’t) I would’ve lost my CPU.

I had to use my system very carefully to prevent shutdown. This is obviously unacceptable, but I had to wait until mid-December before I could do anything about it (I was busy with other things). The heatsink on my CPU was standard AMD-issue - nothing special. I decided to purchase something better, finally settling on the Thermaltake Volcano 9. I made an order on an online shopping site and much to my surprise it was delivered only three hours later! The owner of the store lives only a block or two away from me, and he decided to deliver it himself on his way home. Now that’s what I call service!

I don’t trust myself with expensive equipment (I’ll mess around with older/cheaper stuff, though), so I decided to get the heatsink installed by the guy I bought my computer from. He’s a nice guy, and I’ve been dealing with him for a number of years, so I know he’s good. I opened the heatsink box for the first time. This thing is a monster! It was so big that we couldn’t install it without taking the motherboard out. It sounds like a helicopter, but over time I’ve gotten used to the noise. What’s important is that I can use my system at full throttle without fear of burning it out.

I haven’t posted any articles on PCLinuxOnline over the past three weeks because I b0rked my Gentoo system. I upgraded from glibc 2.2.5 to 2.3.1 and since then I haven’t been able to run certain apps without wrecking everything else. I’ve detailed my problem here and here. If anyone can help I’d much appreciate it.

At the moment I can run most apps, but things screw up when I load any part of KDE (including Konqueror) or Evolution. GTK+ (1 and 2) apps (apart from Evolution) work fine.

Update [2003-03-07]: The problem is with my Nvidia drivers:

Hi! I’m the guy who started this thread. I finally managed to fix things by turning off Grsecurity in my kernel. However, a very similar (but different) problem emerged a few months later. It occurred around the time I upgraded glibc to 2.3.1, so I initially thought glibc was to blame. After lots of experimenting with kernel configs, I discovered that I could have a stable system using Nvidia drivers if I turned highmem off, sacrificing just over 100MB of RAM (I have 1GB total).

I then came across cigaraficionado’s bug report and updated nvidia-kernel ebuild. I compiled a new kernel, this time turning highmem back on, and installed the new ebuild. The updated ebuild had no effect — using the Nvidia driver made my system unstable like before.

My hardware seems fine. Memtest86 detects no errors in my RAM (2x Corsair XMS 512MB DDR333 SDRAM). My GeForce 3 Ti200 card works perfectly in Windows and it worked perfectly in Gentoo until December, around the time I upgraded to glibc 2.3.1. I can’t figure out where the true problem is, but I strongly suspect it lies with nvidia-kernel.

That’s what you get for relying on binary-only kernel modules

Yeah, so I ripped the title off Star Wars, so what? 

About three weeks ago (I think… I lose track of dates easily) on a Saturday I got a rather frantic call from my old friend Reaper. Here’s the Hollywood version (for your reading pleasure):

Reaper: "Aaargh! I’ve screwed up my hard drive and my computer is now useless! I have an appointment to have cable Internet installed on Tuesday and I need a working system so that the technician can install everything. Can I bring my computer to your house so you can take a look at it? Help me Yama, you’re my only hope."
Me: "You may, my minion. I know all. You may bow and kiss my ring."
Reaper: "Yes, my Liege! Thank you, Lord!"

*ahem* Well it went something like that, anyway.

About an hour later, Reaper shows up at my house with computer in tow. He somehow managed to kill his partition table, and after much fiddling I finally managed to fix it using gpart and (GNU/Linux) fdisk. He needed a copy of Windows installed for the cable guy, so I chucked on Win2K (which sadly/humorously is the best MS product since OS/2). To balance this out, I installed Mandrake 9.0.

Reaper is a Windows user, so I tried to make his Windows experience as non-MS (for both security and ethical reasons) as possible. OpenOffice.org and Mozilla are not only very capable applications (and IMHO are bettter than their MS counterparts), they also have direct equivalents in GNU/Linux. So the only thing keeping him in Windows is Windows itself. Reaper is a games player, but I think WineX can fill that void nicely. Of course, KDE is great for Windows converts.

I think a Windows to GNU/Linux transition is best achieved in two stages (to simplify the process). In the first stage, the user weans himself/herself off proprietary (particularly Microsoft) applications. In their place, open alternatives like Mozilla and OpenOffice.org are adopted. Once the user has grown accustomed to those programmes, they can make a transition to GNU/Linux (or BSD, Mac OS X, etc.). The apps stay the same, and only the OS changes. The whole process can take place over a prolonged period, and the user is free to switch back and forth (dual-boot) between operating systems.

Reaper, I know you’ll read this sooner or later, so tell us what you think. Am I talking junk or am I talking junk?

Update: Reaper messed up his hard drive when using Partition Magic 8. Yet another reason not to trust proprietary software, I guess.

I left to Melbourne on Friday night and got back at 2am Wednesday. It’s Friday now. I wanted to write something here earlier but I got lazy.

In short: I had a great time. I really needed to unwind, and now I feel much more relaxed.

Now I’ve got a huge backlog of stuff to do. I had been putting off numerous things for several months, and now that I’m back I can finally do them. The funny thing is that I don’t know where to start. I hate starting things. Once the ball is rolling I’m fine, but the hardest part is getting the ball to roll in the first place. I’ll take each day as it comes.

I had set my mail client (Sylpheed-Claws) to automatically collect my mail every fifteen minutes while I was away. I’m subscribed to several high-volume mailing lists, so I needed to do this to prevent my mail accounts from filling up. Unfortunately, Sylpheed-Claws screwed up and stopped retreiving mail at some point. Fortunately my boxes weren’t full. Next time, I’ll write a script to retreive my mail and have cron execute it periodically. I wanted to do that this time, but I ran out of time. I had a couple of thousand e-mails when I returned. I didn’t think it was worth suspending my mailing list subscriptions for only a few days. I deleted most of them, so now I’m back on track.

It seems like a zillion things have happened while I was away (I wasn’t keeping tabs on the news while I was gone). For instance, there are heaps of cool posts on PCLinuxOnline that I want to read. Here in Sydney, our dry, hot summer weather has helped to create a huge bushfire problem. I don’t live anywhere near the bush and yet I can see and smell smoke. Many people have even lost their homes to the fires On Wednesday, the fires somehow managed to cut the power to my house. Apparently huge areas of Sydney have been affected. There goes my two months of uptime! I had half a day without electricity, and another half day cut off from US Internet sites. Australian and European sites loaded fine, but I couldn’t access US sites like PCLinuxOnline. Everything seems to be fine now, so I can quit complaining.