earth tech

My HP/Compaq a220n died on 13 July, 2007. It does not complete the boot process, and appears to be hanging while executing the optical drive Power On Self Test (POST) code from the system BIOS.

I have since acquired an Acer AMD 64 Dual Core machine [will post the specs later] which came from Walmart pre-loaded with Windows VIsta.

I've been using the Acer for a couple weeks now, and am finding that Windows Vista sux even harder than Windows XP - this is Win95 territory, in fact. Crappy OS, crashes regularly, and runs slower the new, better hardware (this new system has a 64-bit dual core processor w/ 2Gig of RAM) than XP did on a system with only 512M of RAM and a 2 generations older processor.

This system is so slow that the cursor hangs for seconds at a time just while trying to move it across the screen, w/ nothing in particular running in the background.

The Vista user interface is ever cluckier to use than the XP interface (e.g. the new Start Menu is just utter crap - it doesn't fit on the screen, and going to "All Programs" gets me into a mess that need the arrow key pad to get out of without doing serious collateral damage to the menu itself as the brainded trackpad driver tries to drag and drop your menu items in places that, while not specified ahead of time, appear to be more malicious than just random.

In short, this machine

1. Appears to have a malign intelligence all its own
2. Obviously and very "vocally" HATES the user.
3. Appears to be pursuing some other-motivated agenda that has to have been conceived and implemented by Microsoft Corp at the expense of anyone with the temerity to actually try to do useful or productive work with a laptop computer.

Next order of business: Install a 64-bit OS that supports full multi-tasking. [note that Vista seems to be running 32-bit code in a 32-bit emulated environment running on top of the 64-bit hardware - probably why the machine is so slow - HAL is not your friend, anymore, it seems]

So despite the gifting a brand new, higher-end-than-what-we-had replacement for the HP, we still aren't able to accomplish any non-trivial tasks with the new machine until the system software is rebuilt and properly configured. Film at eleven.

Labels: dysfunctional, laptop, sux, sux0r, vista, windows

posted by pd wilson   #   18:51

There is a problem - as mentioned previously - with the default Debian-blows-goats install. For whatever reason, the system refuses to mount a USB mass-storage device when it is connected - that is, the Debian-POS system neither automounts the new storage device, nor will it allow either root or any loggeg-in use to mount it, despite the appropriate entries in /etc/fstab and the expected messges in /var/log/messges.

The forum thread /dev/sda1 missing [now closed] at LinuxForums describes the problem, some attempts at solutions, and some "workarounds" (see our post Found a workaround, maybe...) in detail, but the information we're posting here is not there [or if it is, it's in another thread and we didn't find it], and since the thread is "closed" we are posting it here...

Basically, the solution is very straight-forward: Install the udev package.

While that sounds straight-forward, Debian-blows-dogs-for-quarters has [again] gone out of their way to make the administrators life as difficult as possible by making sure that there is no apparent way to navigate to 'stable' distro from the 'untable' distro, and furthermore there is no clea way to select which Debian-POS distro you want to get .deb packages from. There appears to be no way to do a substring match when seraching packages. And there seems no way to either know which distro (eg.. 'stable', 'unstable', etc) the packages installed on a given machine came from, either.

And now IceWeasel-POS is crashing - randomly deleting characters from the textarea on blogger.com, and taking a good .7sec per charcteer typed to echo the characters typed - andddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd this with dysfunctional spell checking! Also, as you can see, the IceWeasel-POS is repeating characters and words randomly when blogger does its autosave operation.

So this is like : I'm typing a sentence, then stopping and waiting fffffffffffffffffffffffor the words to appeare. - and when they do- the repeats.

We have [sort of] found a solution. Note that in the log below, the 'apt-get install udev' command output is from the second run of same command. Ran it, then ran it again. Not sure why, but it worked.

root@juggalo:/dev# apt-get install udev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  bluez-bcm203x hotplug
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  udev
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 2 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 263kB of archives.
After unpacking 471kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
Get:1 http://ftp.de.debian.org stable/main udev 0.105-4 [263kB]
Fetched 263kB in 1s (183kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 139905 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing bluez-bcm203x ...
dpkg: hotplug: dependency problems, but removing anyway as you request:
 atmel-firmware depends on udev (>= 0.070-3) | hotplug (>= 0.0.20040329-12); however:
  Package udev is not installed.
  Package hotplug is to be removed.
Removing hotplug ...
Selecting previously deselected package udev.
(Reading database ... 139875 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking udev (from .../archives/udev_0.105-4_i386.deb) ...

**************************************************************
* Please purge the hotplug package!
* (/etc/init.d/hotplug has been found on this system)
**************************************************************

Setting up udev (0.105-4) ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/init.d/udev ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/links.conf ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/persistent-input.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/persistent.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/cd-aliases-generator.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/udev.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/devfs.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/hotplug.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/permissions.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/udev/persistent-net-generator.rules ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/scsi_id.config ...

Note that it is not clear how or why bluez-bcm203x hotplug got installed - it was not requested or wanted, as this machine has no Bluetooth devices, and probably never will.

Other notes of note:

• The udev package was already installed, but wasn't working right.
• The installed version of udev did not include the documentation that was [according to the Debian udev package description] supposed to exist in /usr/share/udev/
• As with so many other Debian-POS commands, there was no man page installed, despite the fact that 'apropos udev' showed a number of [non-existent] man pages for the command. This seems to be a pervasive problem with this particular Debian-lies-like-a-whore distro - many [we're inclined to say "most" actually] of the administrative manual pages are notably missing, even though 'apropos' claims they are there - perhaps there is some issue with the configuration of the 'makewhatis' cron job on Debian-blows? Why would these man pages be left out? And if they are going to be left out, why lie about it through apropos?

So yes, we seem to have fixed this problem, but Debian still sux0r.

Labels: auto-mount, debian, linux, sux, sux0r, udev, usb

posted by pd wilson   #   08:54

Okay, I've had it - I am fed up. Debian Linux is crap - pure, unadulterated crap. Furhermore, it is crap like Debian that is giving Linux such a bad name. Nothing works on this distro. Nothing. These are not hardware problems, since most of the stuff work under e.g. WINDOWS or fraking SUSE Linux 9.1 - NINE POINT ONE, fer godx sake - that's what, 4 years old now, 5? SuSE 9.1 still uses the 2.4.x kernel, fer fux sake. Yet SuSE 9.1 has some functionality - it "just works".

Since installing this Debiian crap, nothing on this machine works - from the USB drive (won't mount - Debian records in /var/log/messages that the drive has been plugged in and all is well, but all attempts to use the mount command fail with a "Special File /dev/sdXX not found" error. It's true, they're not there (the /dev/ files). Where did they go? They were there yesterday (at least for a little while); they were there about 20 minutes ago when this same machine was running KNOPPIX from a LiveCD image (same source from which I so unfortunately installed this alleged OS called "Debian" - I will refer to it henceforth as "Debian-piece-of-crap" or "Debian POS" for short - [note that this is a run-on sentence which refers back to the "- from the USB dirve ..."] - to the freaking spell-checker in this stupid IceWeasel browser. As I type this, every word in the text input area is flagged as a misspelling - EVEN the ones that I specifically told StoopidWeasel to "Add to Dictionary" - simple shit like "for" and "to" and "an" and "the" and so on. WtF? "Check-as-you-type" spelling? Konqueror has had it for several versions/years now. Freaking MS WORD has it. AND IT WORKS [sort of, in word, but still].

I've heard for years now how Debian such a l33t "engineers" distro - I fought with obsolescent Debian versions in the lab, at work, thinking to myself "there has to be a good reason they chose this lame bullshi over [fill-in-the-blank-distro] that works" - I've [sort of] followe the FOSS debates where all the acolytes sing hoseanah to the great Debian-ness and how "at Debian they are really committed to FOSS."

I call bullshit. Debian is crap, and anyone who doesn't realize it is jst sucking up to the emporer, every bit as the tailors who pretended to make a suit. Linux is the emporer, Debian are the tailors, and the emporer has no clothes. Deal with it.

Now please excuse me while I go find and install a distro that actually works with some of this hardware that apparenlty is just to newfangled a gee-whiz-bang for Debian to have gotten around to - stuff that everybody else was supporting out-of-the-box 8 or 10 years ago - okay, maybe 5 or 6 years, but still...

And finally, I want to make as clear as possible the information that the Debian Package management tools [such as they are] a clearly sub-standard, inferior, user-unfriendly, and just generally suck ass compared to any other modern computing system standard of which I am aware.

I will never again reccomend Debian to anyone [except perhaps to enemies], and will not bother with the excuciating downloads of this Debian crapware. And KNOPPIX - well, you have mislead us all, KNOPPIX - all your fiddling and fixing to make this Debian bullshit run half-assed normal from a LiveCD - it really shows thru what crap Debian is when the KNOPPIX tweaks have are no there.

One final point - I installed the Debian-piece of crap to /dev/hda4 but that process somehow hosed the saved KNOPPIX LiveCD configuration on /dev/hda1 - there is no apparent way to get it back or to copy it over to the Debian-piece-of-crap partition, so not only does the Debian-piece-of-crap not work, it trashed the most stable configuration this machine has had since WinXP was removed, and didn't bother to either a) warn me it was about to trash my working config, or b) tell me that it had done so once it had hosed both the saved config and the new install.

So knoppix myconfig=/dev/hda1 doesn't work anymore - which I suppose is part of the greater plan by the Debian-piece-of-crtap manufacturers to eliminate Linux as a functional alternative OS.

Labels: ballz, blows, debian, sucks, sux

posted by pd wilson   #   05:03