'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. Open​Of​fice​.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 Open​Of​fice​.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.