Vehemently Vitriolic

Ah, the sites and smells of the hospital. Just got back from the emergency center at Eagle Ridge hospital for my massive wounds.

Well, okay, perhaps “massive” and “wound” is not really what the medical industry would call it. I was walking down my landlords steps to build a MAME machine in his basement, and, for whatever reason, they felt that the carpet on the stairs was causing some sort of serious barrier to people enjoying the runners and stringers in all their glory, so they removed it.

But left the tack strips. (more…)

I have become single (again) while my wife is away fighting space zombies and mortgage lenders in a sub-prime post apocalyptic meltdown, also known as field geology.

As the time passes, I realise that me becoming a completely sloven git is not my own doing. No, like everyone in the US who refuses to take responsibility for their actions, I proudly pronounce:

I have a syndrome!

Its called Rational Female Brain Syndrome® or RFBS as the name on my inevitable patent and Nobel Prize statue will say. It follows the ideal of “behind every great man is an even greater woman”, though this phrase was shortened from “behind every half-assed male is a brilliant, and exceedingly patient, female making the man half-assed as opposed to some infintesmely small fraction-assed male if left on his own”. (more…)

I used to have really bad insomnia. Like ten years ago, before I met my wife, I would regularly pull all-nighters simply becaase I could just not pass out. But my wife has a very soothing and calming demeanor in dealing with this. While in bed she would say things like “Sssshhhhh….just relax and stop moving the bed, put your head on the pillow and rest or I’ll cave your skull in with a hammer”. Just like mom used to do.

But, now that she’s been gone for close to a month on a tour of duty in Alaska, I have been in a steady decline back to primitive-man state, which includes not sleeping overly well, and using only a single frying pan for every meal (eg: spaghetti. Figure that out). (more…)

UPDATE: After a couple months of fighting tooth and nail with my video card, I gave up and bought a super cheap PCI-E nVidia-based card. The problem with the onboard is it just refused to be probed properly. Which meant every time the resolution changed, or the screensaver came on, or the monitor was turned off, it would come back on with two inched of black space on the left and an inch on the right. To remedy this every friggin’ time the monitor was turned back on, I would have to go in to the KDE control panel, change the reoslution to something smaller, save it, then change back to 1680×1050, then, while saving, hold in the “Auto” button on the LCD, and about 60% of the time, the resolution would change properly. The other 40% of the time, I would repeat the process for 10- or 15-minutes. With the 7200GS and the help of Envy, the card was auto-probed and I have yet to have this problem come back. Long story short: If you’re using Linux with this mobo and a widescreen LCD, save yourself the headache and don’t bother with the onboard video and just get a PCI-E card.

My last post was about A-Power and the great power-supply adventure. Turns out, the power supply was not the problem. Turns out, theres something motherboard-related that was toasting these things. So after three power supplies, it was time for a change.

Its been literally 5-years since I had a brand new machine. I have parts up the wazoo from building new machines for clients and cobbling myself a machine from their older parts (building a new 2.4GHz dual-core because the old 2.2GHz single-core is “too slow”), and finally I had run out of enough parts. I had parts, but needed small things like RAM DIMMs, but the old old nature of most of the junk means that not only were parts hard to find, they were expensive. So, despite not having the funds, I decided to build a new one.

Off to A-Power and bought the parts, put it all together and started installing Kubuntu 7.0.4. All went well….except for minor things like the LAN, on-board video card and sound. Other than that all was well.

The motherboard is a P5GC-MX and has a 7.1 sound chip, an Intel 82945G/GZ graphics processor and a gigabit ethernet. ALL of which does not work with the stock install of Ubuntu/Kubuntu 7 (Feisty). After three hours or so of googling, I finally got everything working so I thought I would post everything here if someone stumbles across this (or, more likely, I have to re-do everything and forgot what I did).

First and foremost….DO NOT USE THE CD. It sucks. It breaks a LOT of stuff (like ALSA and Xorg). There is a nice folder called “LinuxDrivers” on the CD. Make a coaster from this, its useless.

LAN
Different versions of this motherboard apparently use different Attansic chipsets. The most recent is the Attansic L2 chipset, which is what mine had. ASUS has released a static driver for it, but have said they will not patch against the kernel, so you’re stuck with this. There is, of course, a FOSS implementation for L1 that has been put into the kernel tree for 2.6.19, but the L2 remains elusive.

Without a LAN, any updates and such were a no-go. Luckily, I found this thread where the guy puts in the compiled driver. I hate signing up for crap, so I used BugMeNot to get it, and assuming you hate it too, here it is: AttansicL2 Kernel Module

Simply put it in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/atl.ko then insert it with insmod /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/atl.ko all as root

To have this restart at boot-time, first backup your rc.local in /etc. Then add the insmod line above “exit 0″ and save.

You should now see the little LAN indicator in the KDE tray whir to life and get online. One down, two to go.

Sound
This was a major pain, mostly becuase I used the CD, which broke libasound.so.2 (actually, it removed it completely) so ALSA would not start at all. Yours may actually work out of the box, but I screwed with the CD before trying, so try your sound first and make sure it works. Take a look at the first reply here (yes its for a laptop, but its the same chipset) and add options snd-hda-intel model=ref to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.

Worked great for me (one I re-built libasound2, alsa-base, alsa-utils and alsa-oss for added flavour). Restart ALSA and check the levels in alsamixer or the KDE mixer sound app thinger.

Video
Another MASSIVE pain. I have gorgeous HP w2207 LCD screens, but for whatever reason, something does not probe these things properly. I am not even remotely Linux-savvy enough to know which part, but this Intel chip, and older nVidia (from the box that blew up), or X all will see only 640×480. Even after manually editing my xorg.conf file, it just refused to go any higher (or caused X to tank completely). Even if your video is working, it may not be using GL (which it can do, quite well as I found out) using the MesaGL package.

Mine was using the i810 driver, but wasn’t reporting the card properly. Some more googling around, and I installed xserver-xorg-video-intel

Restarted X, and bingo, I could change the video modes properly, though I still had to ram through the resolution manually in the xorg.conf file (though, I am told xorg seems to give precidence to whatever it probes over manual entries, which seems kind of….dumb frankly. If I put them in there, I must have a reason. But anyway, I certainly am not going to question the xorg guys/gals)

So there you go. Save yourself some time. After you get everything going, I made sure MesaGL was installed (it wasn’t) and tried out Urban Terror. Worked great. Its no where near as fast as the nVidia was at 1680×105, but what do you want for onboard?

Okay, I don’t want to do an advertisement here (well, until I get legions of fans and start with Google AdWords or something), but I DO want to point out a fantastic local business here in the lower mainland named A-Power Computer Systems if for no other reason that they get more volume and lower prices more. (more…)

Man do I love government. All levels, really, but the larger it gets, the more ridiculous. My all-time favorite are cigarettes. Years ago the the government started outlawing cigarettes in bars. Then restaurants. Now out on open-air patios, and there is a pilot program to make it illegal to smoke in your own car with a child in it. Even when I was a smoker myself, I must admit that not smoking in a bar made thing better. My issue is not getting rid of the smokers, ’cause nothing brings a people together more than creating pariahs. No, my problem is all the “we are doing this for your health” bullshit. The government is really concerned about your health. No really. Not MORE than the money it gets, but just almost as much. You are only one pee-on, whereas the tobacco companies pay oodles more taxes than you do.

Seriously, stop putting the happy we give a shit about you face on it. Just make the things illegal if you are really concerned for the populace, or shut up and let people be.

Next up is a lower form of government (pun intended) in provincial. (more…)

As I was writing part 2 of my San Francisco trip, I got onto the subject of the TSA and my adventures with airports, I thought I would include some background. The problem is, I am equal parts idiot and not-knowing-when-to-shut-the-hell-up. Ingredients for hijinx and hilarity to be sure. (more…)

The annual pilgrimage down to San Francisco. Every year my wife and I head on down to see her great aunt (or “The Trust Fund” as my father in-law likes to say) at “the home”. Its always an entertaining trip, fraught with peril, surprises, tears….maybe even a life lesson or two. Yes, its like one large after school special.

Last year when we went, we drove down to Seattle and got on Southwest (which was an interesting trip seeing as we had never flown Southwest before and hence were not aware of the cattle-call like system they have apparently perfected, nor the much-coveted “A” ticket, which, from what I saw when we were given such manna from heaven, there have been minor wars over). On the way home, Southwest lost our luggage. Not a big deal…we had planned on staying the night in Seattle anyway. The lady was very apologetic, and must have figured we were Canadians when we offered to come pick oit up from the airport tomorrow morning on our way home. For this, we got a $100 gift certificate. It was due to expire this year, so we thought well, we may as well use it up.

Off we went down to the border. My wife and rarely get more than a glance when we head across the border. This is becuase my wife has figured out that the border gaurds asking the questions tend to be on the drivers-side. And I have a very bad tendency to say exceedingly stupid things when I talk to said guards, such as the following discourse that took place a number of years ago on one of our first trips across the border:

Border guard: “Do you have any guns, sir?”
Me: “No, why do I need one? I’ve heard America is kinda rough…..”
Guard: “Pull over there sir.”
Me: “Crap” (more…)

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