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