Updated.

2.6.18, baby:
$ uname -a
Linux bupu 2.6.18 #1 Fri Sep 29 12:18:08 CDT 2006 i686 pentium4 i386 GNU/Linux

All too easy. Why it couldn’t be done in Ubuntu, I have no clue.

Strangeness

I’ve been having issues with GTK+ Python programs lately. Fortunately I’ve fixed that (mostly) by completely removing the builtin PyGTK package and replacing it with the Dropline Gnome packages (weirdest part is that I had to manually remove the PyGTK package provided normally and install Dropline’s — slapt-get would not “upgrade” to the Dropline package for some odd reason.  I’m still having issues with several programs — gnome-sudoku won’t install due to some odd dependency that I can’t figure out, but at least several programs will now run that didn’t before.

I’m having other issues, however, with some games that just won’t compile or run.  Scorched3d, for example, finally compiled after doing tons of tweaks in the source code, but the binary wouldn’t run because of some odd ABI incompatibility (I’ve since removed it so I can’t remember exactly what the message was, but it was something odd).   There are many similar issues that I am having with compiling packages, and there are no binary packages available for them.  I can live without a few things, but the loss of Scorched3d is very disappointing, and I’m not sure what else I will run into.

Is this enough to turn me off of Slackware?  I don’t know, really.  For now, it’s not, and I’ll keep working on finding solutions to these issues.  I always have my former Ubuntu partition to install into for experimentation, so maybe I can go try something else like maybe — gasp! — Fedora Core?  Eh, maybe not, I don’t think I’m that desperate! 

Hell, if it comes down to it, maybe I can run crying back to Gentoo…

So, is it just me…

or does the default Refresh icon in Firefox2 Beta2, at a quick glance, look like the freakin’ Internet Explorer icon?

Please tell me it’s not just me.

Um…

So I had an upset stomach last night, and didn’t do anything at all with Linux.  I have other stuff going on today, so maybe tonight I’ll get around to deleting Ubuntu.

So far, so good on Slackware.  I haven’t really experienced anything terribly negative yet, and the fact that I can control the distro as well as I could control Gentoo, without having to compile things for hours, is a definite bonus.  Ubuntu always made me uneasy with the insane number of things executed at startup that if I dared disable, Ubuntu would go sulk in a corner.  Slackware is pleasingly light on stuff running at startup.

And I still keep the evil of Windows off of this machine — it’s been a month and a half now, I think.  Breathe the free air…

Bye, Ubuntu.

Trying to do any sort of speed improvement with Ubuntu today only ended with Ubuntu sticking out its tongue at me and then pouting.  Various boot kernel panics, freezes, and generally things not working as they should stopped me every single time.

So now it’s time to pull the plug.  Today, I installed grub inside of Slackware and took the responsibility of booting my machine away from the Ubuntu partition.  Tomorrow, I will be going through the Ubuntu install to see if there is anything I need (self-contained installations, data files, configurations, etc), and then I wipe Ubuntu from my hard drive with the wonderful mkfs.ext3 command, creating a new and empty partition where Ubuntu once stood proudly.  I wish I could say I was sad to see it go, but Ubuntu crawling its way onto my hard drive and acting like a savior while misbehaving behind my back gets no sympathy from me.  I’ll be glad to hear it scream as I flush it into the depths of /dev/null.

Putting the Windows key to work

Oddly enough, the one thing I have not been able to figure out until now in Slackware is how to enable my “Windows” keys (the Meta keys). Other distros seemed to automatically map them to “Mod4″ (as my window manager Fluxbox refers to them), but Slackware didn’t, and I wasn’t sure how to make it do my bidding.

Until this morning, when I sat down and found out the magic of xmodmap. Figured out all I had to do is map the keycodes for the keys to Meta_L and Meta_R (left and right Windows keys), and map both those to Mod4, like so:

xmodmap -e 'keycode 115 = Meta_L'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 116 = Meta_R'
xmodmap -e 'add Mod4 = Meta_L'
xmodmap -e 'add Mod4 = Meta_R'

Added that to ~/.xinitrc (not sure that’s the best place for it, but it worked for me!), and now I can use those previously worthless keys to actually do things.

Like a small man trapped inside my brain, trying to escape

The title of this post describes my headache tonight, so I’ll be brief.  Basically, I’m still struggling with DNS issues, as I have found that the other DNS I was using was a third party address that shouldn’t really be used — I still have no idea how the other computer got it.  Both the given nameserver of my ISP and IPs of ones I found by name that were different than the given ones both exhibit random slowness.  I would go ahead and blame my ISP, but damn it, *it works fine in Windows*.

My goal is to find another DNS I can use somewhere that actually freaking works.  And maybe tomorrow I’ll completely destroy Ubuntu as I described yesterday.  Today the little man in my brain has kept me occupied.

Fun with Slackware

So I continued forward with my Slackware adventures today.

Trying to get a laserdisk emulator working (Daphne) to compare its performance with Ubuntu’s, I ran into a dependency problem with the C++ standard library (libstdc++), which was version 5 in Slackware 10.2, but Daphne expected version 6.  Bad thing was, there was no easy way to update without pulling in a lot of dependencies.

The solution?  I found out about Slackware-current, which was sort of a “testing” version of Slackware.  It’s basically all the things that will go into Slackware 11.0 which is apparently coming any day now.  So I figured, why not?  Since I used slapt-get (a package manager for Slackware packages similar to Debian’s apt-get), I updated slapt’s sources list to point to -current, did a –dist-upgrade, and off I went.

Well, upgrading wasn’t going to be as easy as I first thought, since it seemed like I booted right in with no problems at first glance.

GTK programs wouldn’t run, Eterm wouldn’t run, and trying to run an OpenGL-based game hard-locked the system.  Eep.

Fortunately, the first two issues were easy to fix — a couple of dependency downloads later, and those were up and running.

The OpenGL problem wasn’t so easy.  Turns out that the upgrade had corrupted the nvidia driver install (my guess is that it overwrote the GLX libraries NVidia provides), so I had to leave X to reinstall the NVidia drivers.  Oh ho, nope.  Not gonna be that easy, I’m afraid.  The upgrade updated gcc to version 3.4, and the kernel (which was not updated) was still the old stock 2.6.x kernel, which was compiled with gcc 3.3.  If you didn’t know, driver modules compiled with a different version of GCC than the kernel just won’t take.

My solution?  Recompile the kernel with gcc 3.4.  I knew this would be a really good test of Slackware, since I could never get a custom kernel compile to work cleanly on Ubuntu.  Turns out that it worked perfectly (well, so far, anyway — we’ll see if there are any hidden problems lurking about).  Reinstalled the nvidia drivers against the new kernel, and I’m back in business.

Now to the business of the laserdisk emulator.  I used a program that extracted media files from a DVD version of Dragon’s Lair that I own that allows one to play it with arcade-perfect emulation (or nearly so) on the aforementioned Daphne emulator.  I remembered running Daphne back when I had Windows installed on this system (die in a fire, Windows) and it ran perfectly, but under Ubuntu, it was horrible.  The game would skip, audio and video would quickly go out of sync, and move timings would be completely off.  I knew Ubuntu had given me problems in games before, but I wasn’t sure that such terrible problems could be blamed on Ubuntu.  I had compiled an optimized version of Daphne, no help.  I then began to wonder about the media files themselves — maybe some change in Daphne had made the DVD-derived media files not work.

I bit the bullet and went to a Windows machine (my parents’ machine) and installed the Windows version of Daphne and my media files.  Worked perfectly.  So all of that made me determined to get Daphne working on Slackware.

Well, the end result of all this is that Dragon’s Lair in Daphne on Slackware runs perfectly.  I see the occasional minor skip at the beginning of the scene, but it doesn’t seem to affect the audio/video sync or the move timings at all.

Ubuntu’s days on my machine are numbered now.  I think the next thing to do is to go in and really try to tweak Ubuntu as far as I can, since I now have a backup in case Ubuntu decides to completely die on me.  And if all that fails — if Ubuntu is still as slow as ever while playing games — it’s gone.

Slacking

So in response to my irritation with Ubuntu, I did a late night install of Slackware.  Wasn’t easy getting everything set up like I wanted (getting the 2.6 kernel as default was a headache, but everything worked out), but I’m up and running in Slack.

And interestingly enough, things are faster.

A typical example of the problems I had with speed in Ubuntu was Doomsday, the updated and graphically enhanced version of the old first-person shooter DOOM.  Under Ubuntu, the entire game seemed to drag, and frames per second (FPS) seemed to dip down terribly low in places.  Worse yet, at certain random times during the game, the entire game seemed to “skip”, or just freeze in place for anywhere from a fraction of a second to about a half-second, then resume.  I still have not figured out why — there was nothing that was running in Ubuntu that really took up a lot of resources, though there were a metric ton of background services and random garbage running from startup.  Even disabling every single unnecessary daemon, closing all programs, and running the lightweight fluxbox as my window manager, Doomsday still stuttered and skipped its way through.

The problem wasn’t graphics drivers, as the nvidia drivers were installed and working properly, and games did run fairly speedy at times.  It was just that it seemed to be sluggish when trying to run — not very smooth at all.

Flash forward to my Slackware install, and Doomsday runs perfectly well — no sluggishness, no lag, higher FPS, no skips.  Doom 3 runs faster.  Unreal Tournament runs faster.

So what’s the deal?

And as much as I’ve tried to tune and tweak Ubuntu, it seems to be completely futile, and sometimes tweaking endangers the overall health of the distro.  It seems to expect a very specific set of things to happen at boot, and if those don’t happen, the entire boot grinds to a halt.  Seriously, I am beginning to really lose my patience with Ubuntu.

So far, Slackware has been fairly good, but time will tell.  I am having a small issue with the meta key (the “Windows” key) not working in X, and not being able to figure out why, plus a packaging system that doesn’t resolve dependencies can be frustrating to work with at times.  Will I stick around here?  Hard to say so far.  I’ll lurk around in it for a while and see how things work.

My second problem is DNS resolution.  For now, I’ve gotten DNS working okay because I discovered that the Windows machines on my network are somehow using DNS server IPs, and I don’t know where they got them from.  My network uses a router which also acts as a DHCP server, providing internal IPs, routing, and passing the DNS information that it obtains from my ISP to its clients.  My Linux computer was using the same DNS IPs as my router, but the Windows computers were using something completely different.  Why, and where they got these IPs from, I am not certain.  But plugging those IPs into /etc/resolv.conf seemed to dramatically speed up name resolution.  I’m just wondering where the problem lies.

Ah, mysteries…

Bad week

I’ve had a really bad week, so blogging hasn’t really been something on my mind. I’ve even stayed away from my computer more in the past week than usual. When your beliefs, value system, and overall outlook on life directly contradicts that of modern society, with its war, hatred, intolerance, suppression of free will, and embrace of ignorance — especially when one lives in a state that embraces all of these insanities (Alabama) — you tend to get a bit crazy from hearing the same thing over and over. People always saying things that directly contradict my beliefs, and defending their flawed belief system with ignorance and hatred, have made me nearly lose my mind.

I know, this is a Linux blog, and I don’t like to drag politics in, and certainly don’t want to turn this into some sort of emo “oh no, the world is terrible, everyone hates me” blog typical of many MySpace pages, but it does help me to type out what I have going on inside my head, and explain why I have been neglecting this blog, Linux, and the pursuit of all things cool in the Linux world.

Staying away from computers and from the sea of contrary flawed opinions on the Internet has helped me a bit over this past week. I’m back fighting with Ubuntu again, as I am continually having speedy domain resolution issues (while Windows computers on the home network have not had such issues). Once I could not resolve anything related to Google while the remainder of the Internet worked just fine. Resetting the domain servers to the previously flawed servers my router has (I was using the addresses I found for Charter’s DNS servers directly, rather than what they gave me via DHCP, which worked better initially). I’m back to using the DHCP-provided DNS servers, and it is now slow to resolve some domain names at times. Seems to be random, though, since about half the time addresses come up instantly (and meanwhile, Windows computers work perfectly). I don’t quite understand what’s going on here. I’m considering installing Slackware (dual-boot) just to see how things work with that distro regarding my various issues.

And I’m still having slight speed issues with some games that I haven’t had before. Seriously, I really, really like Ubuntu, and it has served me better than any other distro in the past regarding stability and upgrading issues (specifically, lack of upgrading issues), but it’s these minor irritating issues that have me considering looking elsewhere.