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So, holiday is nearly over. I'm taking Monday as well in the hopes that I can fix my sleep pattern, as well as to compensate for the day I came in (Tuesday, when nothing useful was done for various reasons). It's still too soon: I want more downtime, but the work can't wait.
So it goes, and such seems to be life right now. I'm looking forward to this project being over, even if I've been working on it so long now I suspect I'll have trouble switching to something else. Diversity is good, and all that.
Still, content... I'm sure I meant to write something mildly interesting when I opened this window. I suppose I'm doing some tidying up... Ah, yes. Slackware 13.0 is out. I use Slackware as my OS of choice: for the most part it serves me well, but a failed graphics driver update caused some trouble for me a while back. Vertical tearing, instability, the usual. Since Slack 13 is out, I figured, why not? A reinstall solves the problem, and gets me a KDE 4.2.4 desktop, which is probably going to be interesting, as I've never used KDE4 before. So, download ISO, burn, install.
The installation process was pretty painless, since I had my wits about me and gave it the correct information. The installer picked up the RAID volume holding my home directory without any trouble, etc, etc. It was all going so well...
Yes. ATI. Red-headed step-child of the Linux graphics drivers market. The company whose drivers cause untold woes for Linux users everywhere. I'm sure they're quite lovely under Windows, but next time round I'm just buying a damned nVidia card. It seems the latest release of the driver doesn't run under the configuration used in Slackware 13.0, at all: it crashes the window manager reliably, and locks the system about one time in three at the moment. Hence, it is currently uninstalled, and I'm back to one monitor and two or three frames a second OpenGL performance until ATI get their finger out and realise they need to fix things. There will be a bug report later, when I am calm and awake and so on.
Driver support. It's always the damned driver support. I wish I knew why so many companies get it wrong. Are we not paying customers, or something?
EDIT: And now the gas-lift in my chair has given up the ghost. I'm going to bed.
"Could not open default font 'fixed'"
This very special message caused my Xorg 7.2 server to crash on startup, repeatedly. It turns out that Slackware 12.0 has a known bug whereby it doesn't quite get the X fonts install 'right' the first time around. The fix is simple: reinstall the packages "fonts-misc-misc" and "fonts-cursor-misc". Fault confirmed in Slackware 12.0, unknown in 12.1. Since this bug only appears to really be triggered when the X server is installed into an existing Slackware system, but not when a system including an X server is installed all at once, I don't imagine this will be a problem for many people. Still, I thought I'd scribble the fix down somewhere public, to add my voice to the throng of people making this suggestion.
I have just spent a long and frustrating hour trying to install the Microsoft Core Fonts onto my Slackware desktop. For posterity, here is how I eventually acheived it:
Easy when you know how...
Interesting weekend, I suppose.
The Fencing Club had a seminar, basically a concentrated session with less people in which we talked about such high-brow things as tactics and timing as well as the fine art of poking people and getting away with it. This was tiring, but interesting: I have learned, for example, that I have a long way to go before I become a halfway-competent epeeist. Looks like some more training is in order.
Since the next day was Sunday, Fouad, Dom and I went off to Ditchling Beacon for lunch. The food was ... okay, nothing special and a little pricey, but quite edible, and the views were lovely.
I have spent most of the evening wrestling with the Linux logical-volume-manager, a tool that allows partitions to be split or combined across multiple physical devices. I am using it to assemble an 80GB partition and a 120GB hard disk into a single device. We shall see how this turns out.
The parts of the evening which the LVM did not occupy were mainly occupied with making cookies (yum) and puzzling over the sharp thing in my boot. Many theories were advanced when I told people of it, but they were all wrong. Some may remember the toenail incident a little while ago: well, now I have no nail whatsoever on that toe. It just broke off. No pain at all. Weird.
Just a warning to those that care. I'm taking my desktop computer down to rebuild the operating system and repair a series of problems it has developed over the last six months. This means I'll be somewhat unreliable on email and IM for the next few days.
The outage will likely last until Sunday night, and will not affect this website.