News from Seppi

I can hear it now, in Jack Bauers voice;

“Living on the edge though. Installing Arch on a computer is just asking for trouble.” ~VividReality

I’m tired at this point, but somehow the last 24 hours has been exactly like a season of 24, except with less cutscenes. I will admit though, the visual art style can be repesented very similarly with tmux;

This is how the TV show was; This is how my season was;

3 am, Saturday

I’m up late doing who knows what, and my phone goes off. Aura, the android app to watch your skill training in Eve Online tells me; “Current queue low - Detected 1 skill queue is low.”

I fire up my eve client, and bam; my xorg crashes, and it crashes hard. I’ve been dropped to TTY. Basically my graphics stack blows up, and all I have is a black screen with text on it.

I start my graphics stack back up with startx (startx masterrace) and decide I will have tomorrow to figure out what’s wrong.

11:30 pm, Saturday

Nothing happens as I have been out and about the whole day, and I decide now is a good time to fix my problem. I start out by finding my problem on the arch forums, and find that my xorg-server drivers are to blame, and I need to downgrade. This doesn’t sound too bad, so I download the proper packages, and downgrade my xorg-server, xorg-common, nvidia and nvidia-utils.

12:15 am, Sunday

It’s not hard to downgrade, and I restart my computer to let the drivers initialize, and I start up my graphics stack, but suddenly, my mouse stops working and anything that depends on libgl stops working; **which happens to be just about everything*. About the only thing that works now is xterm. I start tmux’ing like a wild man scouring the internet in hopes of finding a way to fix this issue.

12:30 am, Sunday

My computer has rebooted for the umpteenth time, and now it’s running a fsck on a 1TB drive. Time to grab a book and some bean bags, and wait for it to finish.

12:45 am, Sunday

The fsck finishes. The hunt continues.

1:00 am, Sunday

I’ve abandoned all hope at this point, and decide to update back to the current version of xorg and nvidia. I’ve cleared my pacman cache in hopes of things syncing up properly. I check my openbox configs, my xorg configs, I even test my entire .config folder. Alas, it nothing helps.

1:30 am, Sunday

I start uninstalling packages almost at random in hopes I can just re-install my xorg server from scratch. Bam; wine, skype, steam, anything having to do with the lib32-libgl libraries, are being thrown out of the window!

2:00 am, Sunday

Weird stuff starts happening now. I can’t install the defenestrated packages any more. Somethign good finally happens; I start up openbox and am able to get xterm to run from the default configurations. Now I can find out why my stuff isn’t working!

I don’t have libgl.so installed somehow.

2:30 am, Sunday

I’m googling like a mad man, and I’m contemplating switching back to windows, but then I find a post. A forum post says something about xorg not working with xf86-input-mouse. I promptly remove it, and suddenly libgl.so is available. Things start to work again; but not everything.

2:45 am, Sunday

Suddenly it occurs to me; I cleaned the pacman cache. I must have bombed my config for pacman in the process! I open up my pacman config, and there it is; the multilib mirror is commented out. I uncomment it, update my database, and re-install my stuff. wine is back.

3:00 am, Sunday

It’s very late at this point, and I feel like it’s time to call it quits. There’s only two hours left in my skill queue, but I’m not willing to repeat this horrid adventure again just to see if I can get eve to work. I decide to fire up eve to ensure that I’m still having the same issue.

xorg remans openbox still runs lxterminal isn’t spewing out errors wine hasn’t crashed

eve runs.

Such an amazing plot twist, after all this horsing around of re-installing just about every component of my graphics stack, and then fixing all the crap I broke, for no reason I can possibly understand; eve runs.

Sure, this story isn’t as excited or even laymanized to any degree as 24 is, but I have just had my own adventure, and through it all, I have defied the odds.

Just like Jack Bauer, I am tired, worn out, confused and bewildered; but I got the bad guy.

So I was watching the Linux Weather Forcast (Collab Summit 2013) and noticed something interesting that popped up, and decided to do some research.

Originally when Google offered merge code from the android kernel for for the linux kernel, the linux folk accepted it; in particular the kernel/power/wakelock.c.

During the presentation, he says that Rafael J. Wysocki wrote a better version of google’s wakelock.c. He tells us they “Quietly switched over.”

Here is the wakelock.c on the master branch of the Linux Kernel (At writing, almost 3.9)

Here is the wakelock.c on the android 3.0 branch of the kernel (Still written by google)

Here is the wakelock.c on the android 3.4 branch of the kernel (Now written by Rafael!)

Perhaps to some, this sounds rather obvious, but to me it’s great to see that Android isn’t just “forking the linux kernel”, but returning to the baseline!

And although I don’t expect to see the Android Kernel 3.8 on my phone any time soon, it’s nice to see it being based off of the Linux Kernel, rather than their own brances.

I saw this post over on /g/ a while ago.

C: you are given;
an infinite supply of wood
an infinite supply of nails
a table saw
and a hammer.

C++: you are given
an infinite supply of wood
an infinite supply of sheet metal
an infinite supply of nails
an infinite supply of screws, between four and six inches long
a table saw
a hot glue gun
and an electric screwdriver.
on the ground nearby you see a hammer.
the hammer has a note on it: "do not use this hammer"

Java: you are given
an infinite supply of wood, in any length of 2x4
an infinite supply of screws
and an electric screwdriver.

lisp: you are given
an infinite supply of wood, able to materialize wherever you want it, in whatever shape you can describe mathematically.

brainfuck: you are given
an infinite supply of identically sized wooden cubes
and a hot glue gun.

INTERCAL: you are given
an infinite supply of measuring tape
a bust of adolph hitler
fourteen glass spheres
a girl you knew in elementary school, who would pick on you
a single strand of spaghetti falls from your pocket
oh god
and a pipe wrench.

Malbolge: you are given
some cardboard
and a duck.
You are not allowed to touch anything other than the duck.
You can speak only in consonants.