gregoa's blog

after becoming a member of the Debian Perl Group on thursday I uploaded five modules to the group's svn repository today.
eloy took them just a few hours later and uploaded them to the new queue. - thanks!

chronicles of the suffering of an old server:

• came home from work.
• started my workstation.
• realized I had no connection to guinan (playground server & web/apt proxy & file server).
• turned on the monitor: nothing.
• did a hard reset.
• guinan booted, everything seemed to work.
• the syslog didn't show anything interesting.
• some minutes later guinan froze again.
• hard reset again, & I chose memtest86+ from grub.
• during the 7^th test strange charcaters showed up in the time column. no reaction to key presses.
• turned the power off. opened the chassis. took out the RAMs. broke the socket of the first RAM slot (only at the side).
• turned the power on. much fan sound, no picture, no network.
• changed the monitor. changed the graphics card. changed the PCI slot for the graphics card. nothing.
• booting with or without RAM, with or without graphics card just produces fan noises, HD noises, nothing more. no beeps e.g.
• closed the chassis, moved guinan back in position, turned her off.

hints welcome.

today hendrik announced new versions of his *obex* packages on the debian-mentors list. I grabbed & installed them; & — hooray! the stuff works with my nokia communicator 9500. finally I'm able to up-/download files under debian (with obextool using obexftp via the usb connection).

related non-news: (g|w)ammu still don't like the communicator (or the dku2 cable) - I can connect via the at19200 connection type but then I have no access to contacts/calendar/sms/...

update 1: fixed an error (--get doing the same as --getdelete) in hendrik's version of obexftp & sent him a patch. updated packages are available from the Toastfreeware Debian Repository. — 2006-03-05

update 2: some 70 minutes later hendrik has applied a slightly modified version of the patch & has published new packages. thx! — 2006-03-05
packages removed from the Toastfreeware Debian Repository.

• ... boring
• ... boring
• ... boring
• ... boring
• ... boring
• ... annoying because of the permanent reboots
• ... boring
• ... boring
• ... boring
• ... boring
• ... boring
• ... bugging because some things work only on the 2^nd try
• ... boring
• ... boring
• ... boring
• ... boring
• ... boring

at least knoppix & dd were helpful for cloning the installed disk.

toastfreeware's first packages entered the debian archive this evening: fullquottel, mailtextbody (both written by us), & mimetic (a C++ library used & packaged by us). maxx (martin würtele) has uploaded the packages to the NEW queue about one & a half hours ago. - thanks!

yes, this is exciting ;-)

created an RSS 2.0 feed for my "archäologie des alltags" & linked it up to planet cUG. stay tuned for new entries ;-)

yesterday I finally changed ion3's keybindings. cf. my article.

& Alt_L didn't work as the Meta key in XTerms, e.g. in irssi. now it does.

after xchat annoyed me once again by forgetting to set the mark lines after the last read line in a channel window I decided to give irssi a try — finally, after having thought about it for months.

well, it took me some hours, I grabbed through heaps of settings and tons of scripts (361 in the package irssi-scripts), & I'm sure I will have much fun with it in the future.

$console_apps += 1;

just when I got used to centericq's morse messages they stopped. - no failure of centericq or cw though but it seems that aplay has learned to use the sound card even if mpg321 is playing music.

strange - I can't remember changing anything relevant but maybe the 300+ MB aptitude upgrade pulled in something new. - & the effect isn't bad in general - au contraire ...

concerning the fun component:
installed xdaliclock. *hihi*

after several tries I got DRI working with my intel 865G graphics chip.

gregoa@belanna:~$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes
gregoa@belanna:~$ glxgears 
379 frames in 5.1 seconds = 74.989 FPS
82 frames in 5.3 seconds = 15.381 FPS
66 frames in 5.1 seconds = 13.059 FPS
82 frames in 5.1 seconds = 16.237 FPS
80 frames in 5.0 seconds = 15.954 FPS
82 frames in 5.1 seconds = 16.209 FPS
gregoa@belanna:~$ 

how?
reading logs (i.e. /var/log/Xorg.0.log in this case) is often helpful; it told me to use the i915 instead of the i830 kernel module. [0] - new kernel - new luck.

update 1: tried some things. now glxgears is getting faster. don't ask me why exactly ...

gregoa@belanna:~$ glxgears 
594 frames in 5.0 seconds = 118.757 FPS
662 frames in 5.0 seconds = 132.250 FPS
647 frames in 5.0 seconds = 128.470 FPS
660 frames in 5.0 seconds = 131.886 FPS
710 frames in 5.0 seconds = 141.882 FPS
727 frames in 5.0 seconds = 145.335 FPS
692 frames in 5.0 seconds = 138.279 FPS
732 frames in 5.0 seconds = 146.280 FPS
gregoa@belanna:~$ 

update 2: & now it's slow again:

gregoa@belanna:~$ glxgears 
345 frames in 5.0 seconds = 68.716 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.142 FPS
82 frames in 5.1 seconds = 16.196 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.140 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.099 FPS
76 frames in 5.0 seconds = 15.130 FPS
62 frames in 5.0 seconds = 12.340 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.064 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.193 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.102 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.132 FPS
81 frames in 5.1 seconds = 16.017 FPS
80 frames in 5.1 seconds = 15.838 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.083 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.183 FPS

update 3: better weather today?! or is it the new X server? or the new kernel?

gregoa@belanna:~$ glxgears 
3730 frames in 5.0 seconds = 745.987 FPS
4943 frames in 5.0 seconds = 981.419 FPS
1112 frames in 5.0 seconds = 221.716 FPS
4423 frames in 5.0 seconds = 881.946 FPS
5083 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1016.595 FPS
5226 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1041.151 FPS
4654 frames in 5.1 seconds = 921.170 FPS
4479 frames in 5.1 seconds = 874.422 FPS
2713 frames in 5.0 seconds = 539.345 FPS
5328 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1065.594 FPS
4946 frames in 5.0 seconds = 987.530 FPS
5181 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1036.035 FPS
5084 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1009.898 FPS
5375 frames in 5.1 seconds = 1063.975 FPS
5264 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1044.412 FPS
5323 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1064.588 FPS
5034 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1001.461 FPS

[0] CONFIG_DRM_I915=y