Stuffed

Just made Pasta Arrabiata again. This time I went full hog and oven baked it and everything, as opposed to cheating and just doing it all in a pan. With 10 minutes to go before it was due out of the oven I decided to nip to the CO-OP and get some squash to drink. When I got to the CO-OP I chose the shortest queue thinking, mistakenly, that it would be the quickest option. The guy in front of me had exactly 58,351 lottery tickets he wanted to buy (possibly a slight exaggeration) and the guy behind the till was too young to scan them through. Fucksticks. He had to get someone else to scan them, and rather than carrying on serving while they scanned them he just stood there. Twat. When he finally served me he managed to throw half my change on the floor.

I legged it back to find the dinner I had so painstakingly slaved over for over an hour was burnt. TWAT.

Luckily it wasn't too bad. Bits of it were a little, um, crunchy, but the overall taste was bloody nice. I'll have to make it again and not burn it to see just how good it is. If I had a bigger casserole dish I'd offer to make some for some of my flatmates too.

I am now completely stuffed and throughly enjoying it. Recently eating too much has led to sudden bouts of feeling incredibly sick but today I just feel pleasantly full. :)

Firefox is still compiling... :(

Suspend To Disk

Ahh I just found some useful information on suspending to disk that I'd not, previously, seen:

http://softwaresuspend.berlios.de/features.html#compare

The guy who wrote the suspend to disk code and website needs to learn a little about writing documentation.

Gentoo

I'm installing Gentoo on the laptop. I want to see whether I can get the power management features that are supposed to be so much more improved in 2.6.9 to work. It's suspend-to-disk that I want. The whole thing is a big hack though. When you suspend it writes the contents of the RAM to a compressed image on the swap partition, and then shuts down. Some programs can't handle this, so have to be unloaded from memory before suspending. The clock gets screwed up and so has to be re-synched when starting back up. When starting up again the system has to check that you don't boot a suspend-unaware version of the Kernel by faffing with Lilo... The list of ugly hacks goes on and on.

Besides all this I decided to give it a go. If I can get it working then it'll become my main OS on the laptop, and windows will be kept only for Buzz: The program I make music with.

I compiled in the power management stuff and set the Kernel to allow suspend-to-disk. Once I'd done this and rebooted etc I suddenly realised that I had NO idea how to invoke it. I went back into the Kernel config menu and took a look at the help for it. It suggests using swsusp to invoke it. Fair enough. Is swsusp installed? Is it fxxk. So then I started looking for the package that contained it. Eventually, after much faffing I found a package called hibernate-script that appeared to include it. I tried to install it and found it was masked because it was supposedly incompatible with my system.

In a fit of desperation I unmasked it and installed it. Tried running it, it crashed the Kernel. Tried a few ideas I found on various websites, such as

but that also simply crashed the Kernel.

Seemed to work, putting the computer into "standby" mode. Fine. Not quite suspend-to-disk, but it's a start. Start the computer up again and it crashes. Great.

In the end I tried applying the patches found at http://softwaresuspend.berlios.de/ but that didn't seem to help much either.

Anyway I've now found a document on the Gentoo website that explains how to set up a collection of other power saving mechanisms, so I'll set all that up and see what I can do from there.

The good thing is that it's like a breath of fresh air using Linux on the laptop. It had SuSE on there which Burt left on there, but I didn't really get on with SuSE. I didn't like Yast much, (it wouldn't let me upgrade to 2.6.9 OR install Fluxbox!) and it was all set up for Burt. I use a very specific setup, which revolves around Fluxbox and SuSE didn't seem to want to let me do things my way. Anyway, now Gentoo is on there it looks pretty much the same as my desktop, which is great. If I can just get the Power Management right I will be the envy of all the geeks in my lectures ;)

Right, now to get some lunch. I'm starving.

Cash Issues

Just been to the student finance office to see about getting an emergency loan. They don't have any for fourth year students: Only first year students. Obviously fourth year students aren't allowed to have financial difficulties. The good news is that my loan has gone into my account at long fucking last. The bad news is that I got a letter the other day saying that because I'd not filled in a direct debit mandate for my tuition fees which I never received by a deadline I was unaware of, I am now liable to pay the whole lot (£1150) by the 19th or have my computing and library access revoked. Also, the rent that was taken out of my account was returned to the account (with a rather hefty fine for the privellage) so I'm now going to have to grovel to the accommodation office too.

I'm sick of being a student.

"You Lucky, Lucky Baaastard!"

I've been parking in the carpark behind my house since the start of term. Parking in the carpark requires a permit, which I will obtain just as soon as I can afford it. The University shot itself in the foot a little because I went to see them early in September to get a permit, but they told me I wouldn't be able to buy one until much later in the month. Problem is, I knew I wouldn't be able to buy one by that time as I'd not have the funds to cover it.

Today the van with the permit inspectors arrived to see if anyone was parked without a license. I saw them arrive as I was stood in the kitchen. I watched as they stopped in the carpark. Then one of them got out with his A5-sized tickets. Clearly someone was parked without a permit: me. The first ticket is only ever a warning so I wasn't too worried. He walked over to a Honda and ticketed it, got back in the van, and drove off.

I didn't get ticketed for some reason! :D

Dinner

Decided to make a stir-fry for dinner. I chose, amongst other things, to put some peppers in there. I sliced a load of yellow pepper, and then started on the red pepper. When I cut it open I was stunned to see another pepper inside it. A pepper in a pepper. For a while I felt slightly sick to be honest. I can see pictures of all sorts of disgusting stuff, but anything out of the ordinary with something that is about to go down my throat and my stomach starts doing the Salsa.

Eventually I took a picture of it, then binned the inner-pepper and cut the outer pepper up.

Weird, eh?

Better

The slow-down problem I was suffering with seems to have gone! The kernel upgrade was worth the pain. It's so nice to be able to rip a CD, encode OGGs, encode FLACs and listen to music all at the same time without any loss of response from the keyboard/mouse or the music juddering.

Lovely :)

Welcome Back, Desktop

Ahhh it feels so nice to have everything working again. It's a funny thing, but I swear the system ... feels different. I'm still unsure whether the problem I was trying to fix has gone or not, but the system seems much more happy now. I couldn't have put up with the 640x480x16 colours for much longer.

In the end, the single thing that was causing me so much grief was this: The nvidia-kernel driver installs to the wrong place. Seriously. It installed itself to /lib/modules/2.6.9/video/nvidia.ko when it should have installed to /lib/modules/2.6.9-gentoo/video/nvidia.ko, like all the other modules. *sigh* Ah well, at least I have my system back and it's had a damn good overhaul.

Wow, even the SoundBlaster Live! has started working now. Although, that's only on OSS, I must get it working under ALSA too.

B0rked System

I've been trying to work out a few minor problems that have been irritating me, and in the end I decided to try upgrading to kernel 2.6.9 to see if it helped at all. My sysem is now not particularly happy with me, and I am in the process of upgrading all outdated packages on my system in the hope that doing so will fix the various broken applications I have.

Only problem is, it turns out there are 77 outdated packages, and a lot of those are huge. I'm going to bed while it crawls through the process of updating them.

Pasta Arrabiata

Made it for my dinner this evening, and my god it was nice. Even though I do say so myself. Only problem is, even after I'd just finished eating it I wanted more. Lots more. It's now a few hours after eating it and I'm starving, and every time I think about it I start salivating.