Bobulate

I mentioned that I had one machine that wouldn’t run OSOL 2009.6, so I did a little hardware debugging on it. Step 1 is, of course, removing all the bits that aren’t essential. So I stripped the machine down to two sticks of RAM on the motherboard and a CD drive, and lo! It booted and behaved normally. Step 2 was adding back RAM until it was full again (at 6GB). The reason to strip RAM at all is that I’ve had bad sticks in the past and some OSsen are picky, so I figured stripping down was possibly useful. And, having repopulated the RAM banks, things were still OK. So it must have been one of the two extra NICs — an RTL8100 and an RTL8169 — in the PCI slots. Left them out for now, since the on-board NIC was now supported. Chalk up another problem worked-around and not really fixed.

I have a stupid early train to Germany tomorrow, so just a few short notes on KDE 4.3-beta on OSOL: all graphicsview things seem broken. Using the raster renderer doesn’t help. Icons are not found — at least not the oxygen ones that I thought would come with kdebase-runtime, but I can use the Tango ones installed on the system. Plasma crashes. Even konsole crashes a while after plasma and kwin do. KMail is busy pulling in 500MB of disconnected IMAP, nothing bad happened there yet.

While pstack(1) would have been an obvious tool to apply to any of the crashes, that’s something to look at some other day. For now, it’s enough to have finished round one of compiling. [[ At GCDS there will be lots more time for polishing, for sure. ]]

As I mentioned previously, I’ve updated some of my machines to OSOL 2009.6. Only some, though. It refuses to start on my AMD 760G based machine — gets through grub, shows the splash and then hangs. I haven’t sat down to debug that one. It does run quite nicely on my new laptop (some folks asked: it’s an MSI GX620, which is nominally a “gamer’s laptop”. Poor battery life, but I realised that I don’t use the lappy in planes and on the longer train trips I have there’s power. GF9600, P8600, 4GB, 320GB — it’s slightly more powerful than my desktop machines. The keyboard is OK, takes a little getting used to because some of the punctuation is slightly smaller than usual. It has a numeric keypad, which as far as I’m concerned could have been left out for some bigger keys. The machine is a little noisier than I might have wanted, too.). There’s also a really nice VirtualBox image for OSOL 2009.6. That one only gets you a text login, though.

On the KDE4 front on OSOL, we hit some issues similar to what happens on Windows (and to a lesser degree on FreeBSD). I’ll quote Christian Ehrlicher from his recent “stopping Windows development” blog entry:

Another problem I’ve is that I could not fix bugs in kdelibs just because the dependencies are moving fast and since we have to take care for all system libs (png, xml, openssl, pcre, …). Making sure that they’re up-to-date can take a lot of time. And when I finally managed to compile a KDE program I hit compiler errors. This is all fixable but not when you’ve only a little amount of time for KDE development.

Pavel has been hacking up a veritable storm in updating our KDE builds to 4.3-beta, and I’ve been following along trying to update dependencies (gpg and friends, lzo, akonadi, …) as well. And then we hit new dependencies (what is openslp?) all of a sudden, which means backtracking and packaging some other bit of Free Software first.

All this hacking happens in the publicly writable kde4-specs-42 Mercurial repository on solaris.bionicmutton.org. It’s publicly writable so that anyone can contribute, but that also means that it sometimes gets screwed up. By me, for instance, because I pushed something last week that broke all 64-bit builds in it. Gah. Anyway, that’s cleaned up now, and the current status is: KDE 4.3-beta builds, runs ok (oh joy of konsole compared to GNOME-terminal). In VirtualBox there are rendering issues. Those will go away in time, I imagine, or once someone fiddles around with default themes and such.

My intention is to release a OSOL 2009.6 KDE 4.3-beta VirtualBox appliance as soon as I have something that works “well enough.” That means that you need to be able to log in from a display manager (gdm or kdm, I don’t care — I haven’t gotten either of them to start up properly on the appliance yet) and get at least the KDE Plasma Desktop functionality, with Konqueror and Konsole as applications. That would make me happy, as a new milestone in the ever-shifting race to keep up with KDE development.

The Netherlands was one of the countries to vote early in the EU parliamentary elections this year — and it may end up in hot water due to releasing results early — so I did my bit. Now that things are over here, the paper is full of opinion articles on how the voting and campaigns were totally useless. Seems like a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there. In any case the biggest surprise in voting for me was casting a vote on paper. There were legal challenges to the voting machines — closed-source, not effectively auditable — over the winter and therefore things have switched back to paper. Seems now I need to think about the security of a big plastic bin again from a democratic perspective.

I’ll be out of the office and out in the woods for two days. The annual school camp for my kids school is on this week and — like last year — I have volunteerd to spend two days in the kitchen. Just like last year my regret is that the menu is entirely fixed by the school’s camp plan and there’s no room for weird experiments. Anyway, I’ll be away for two days and will no doubt come back to a mountain of email and to-do’s — on friday I also get to teach my first workshop on SSL/TLS for high school kids.

It’s hardly rocket science, but I have derived satisfaction this evening from changing the tire on my bicycle. It no longer goes wobble and bump — the sidewalls were tearing on the old tire — and my bike feels a good deal faster again. The previous tire lasted two years and several thousand km of touring and commuting.

I broke the work down into little steps: remove wheel from bike (quick release axle); remove old tire; put new tire on; reinsert inner tube; mount in frame. Between those steps I installed three different Free Software operating systems on a new laptop. My old Thinkpad is giving up the ghost — it overheats regularly when it’s warmer than 24 degrees or when I run any kind of compile on it — so it is time for a new one. Especially with the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit upcoming, and I want to be able to work while somewhere warm.

Somewhat to my surprise, OpenSolaris works best on the new machine; Kubuntu 8.10 (admittedly that’s an older version) is ok and FreeBSD 7.1 just doesn’t go. I gather that’s related to SATA DVD drives, and FreeBSD 8 snapshots don’t like the drive either. Unfortunately, this whole thing leads to a dilemma: given a nicely working new-ish bicycle and a nicely working new laptop, which do you choose? It’s not safe to code and cycle, kids (unless you’re riding something like this).