Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

As the title says my main system is dead. I was working on it earlier, went to get some dinner and came back later to find it powered down. Hit the power button and it never POSTed Stripped it down sequentially until I was left with just the CPU plugged into the main board and I still don't even get any beeps! It is a Gigabyte GA-K8NS Pro motherboard and has never been quite right so I am tempted to think it is that, but there is also the possibility of graphics, RAM and CPU issues.

Until I get some cash and figure out what went I won't be doing much development as that box housed all of my work including Gentoo CVS repos, experimental ebuilds and such. I think the hard drive is intact but don't have any other SATA systems. Pretty sure I also have a DVD backup from about a month or so ago, but my first priority is to get the system working again. If anyone feels like sharing any tips with me on diagnosing my system I would welcome them. It has been a crappy week - at least I have my new laptop so I can still get some work done. Most of my data and SVN repos are on that box too though

Update: It does seem to be the time for system problems with quite a few devs having trouble with their systems in the last few months. Checking on my mainboard (pretty sure it is that - hunch though) it is three weeks out of warranty. Not a good week at all - can't get anything done until I get my system working again...

Just finished fixing the compilation errors I was getting with kalzium in KDE 3.5 beta 1 and it is a massive improvement in my opinion. I can't believe how much it has changed in such a short time! I have included a quick screenshot of the main UI below.

I have been testing the new KDE 3.5 beta1 split ebuilds for the past few days. A few of them are failing to build here, but noting essential. Overall it is looking good. I am keeping regular backups of my email just in case, but the new version of kmail seems much snappier than any previous release I have every used. Some of the new features such as the image view mode of konqueror are certainly nice, as well as the addition of superkaramba and its installer. Notifications of device insertion also work well here and the beta seems pretty stable here.


This will probably be the version of KDE I will be running at the UK Linux Expo on 5/6 October. I have been using it as my main desktop since alpha1 without too many problems on my new Turion64 based laptop. There are lots of UI improvements, but still some bugs to clear up too I still haven't tried it with qt-3.3.5, or GCC 4.* yet. Anyway back to moving email and web sites to my new server....

I have finished moving my old Gallery 1 site from my old server to the new one, and took the opportunity to migrate over to the newly released Gallery 2. Everything seemed to work really well and the migration went across without too many issues. I had been testing the betas and rcs anyway, but it was great to see the final product. I think my gallery looks much better now. I did see another Gallery 2 site with the year as a big heading, and the albums taken in that year in that section which I really liked.

Anyway I am really busy and am going to have to shoot. I took the opportunity to add all the photos from my trip to Japan, stag week in Tenerife, our wedding and some of the honeymoon photos. Hopefully I will get time to add more later. I am very impressed overall, but I would really like the photos in the random photo and when you are looking at individual photos to be centred. I will have to see if there is an easy way to do that soon.

I have been so busy recently. Over the weekend I was getting my new server online and configured. Some of you may remember the terrible problems I had with 1&1 a while back. Then the manic travelling during the Summer, wedding and months trying to catch up on everything I needed to do whilst I was away (still not caught up - sorry if you are waiting on something).

Well I finally got a dedicated server sorted, and it is of course running Gentoo. To be more exact it is running AMD64 Gentoo Hardened kernel and toolchain and it has been rock solid so far. I am renting the server from OH Telecom who have been very helpful and friendly so far, they even downloaded an amd64 2005.1 LiveCD for me to install from Using all the grsecurity/PaX stuff with the hardened toolchain and everything still works too! I am new to this stuff, but the hardened docs seemed to explain it all very well.

If you are seeing this blog entry it also means that DNS has updated and nothing broke! Hopefully you won't see all my blog posts again, or something like that, as I have seen happen when others have moved servers before... I am gradually moving all my email and web sites over, testing new stuff out and making sure it all works. It will also allow me to give some of the server oriented Gentoo packages much more testing too - I have spent the last few days trying to get all the Apache and PHP stuff keyworded correctly. Please poke me if I missed anything.

Rob (tigger) sent a gentle reminder about the UK Linux Expo that is on 5-6 October at Olympia London. As he said we have a small booth in the .org village, and there will be several Gentoo developers in attendance including myself and Rob. I will be taking my new Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi laptop I have already blogged about several times, along with my new Fuji F10 digital camera to preserve moments from the expo forever

I would also like to encourage all the developers to send me their GPG keys and to take part in the key signing which will be going off at the conference. I prepared a page with instructions here. I have signatures on my key ring from many of the European developers at FOSDEM, and it would be good to extend the web of trust to the UK developers too. I think that is everything - I look forward to meeting up with the developers and users, hopefully some who went to the Gentoo UK meeting will be there again.

I just wanted to share my discovery of Digikam with you all. It is such an amazing program that does all the stuff I had been wanting after rediscovering my love of photography and getting my new Fuji F10. I have also found a good processing lab that will scan my 35mm films to CD for a reasonable fee for the shots I take with my Nikon F80.


I committed bumps to media-gfx/digikam-0.7.4, media-plugins/digikamimageplugins-0.7.4 and also added the corresponding 0.8.0_beta1 versions to p.mask. The betas seem to be working really well though, and it is much snappier due to using sqlite I think amongst other improvements. The screenshot shows the main UI in action with some of my honeymoon snaps.

Add in the digikamimageplugins package, along with the kipi-plugins and you have a really powerful application that can catalogue all of your photos, edit them, touch them up, prepare backups, CDs and print them. I think it is really starting to come into its own with 0.7.4 and 0.8.0_beta1 having many more image manipulation plugins and a pretty amazing feature set. Just emerge digikam digikamimageplugins kipi-plugins to get all the photo editing goodness

I think I had had the worst 24 hours in a long time! It started with the hard drive in my old PII 450 server failing, taking out my email at about 1am. After recovering what I could, setting up an alternate server to accept email for my Gentoo and general email I got some sleep at about 2:30am or so.

Driving in to work this morning some idiot taxi driver goes into the back of my car! Took his details but it doesn't look like there was any damage. Then I had to try and get in as I had someone visiting at work and had to make some samples with him today for nanolithography. That went OK apart from dropping a piece of prepared silicon on the floor and feeling really tired.

Finally got to the end of the day feeling like crap. Went to pick Louise up from work and got stuck in traffic for about 50 minutes for what is usually only a 5 minute drive in rush hour! Some idiot reversed into me very slowly at the traffic lights too - really unimpressed as he saw me there. When I got to Louise's workplace I decided that she could drive us home.

Got home and Louise made some dinner, then crashed out on the sofa at about 7pm. Went to bed and fell to sleep, but woke up again at about 10pm and don't feel like I am going to be able to sleep anymore. Took my new laptop out of its cool backpack style case and noticed I had forgotten its power supply and mouse - they are at work. I guess I will find out how long the batteries last before giving up. It has just turned midnight now so hopefully tomorrow will be better!

Well I seem to have my new laptop working pretty well. I decided to just put KDE 3.5 alpha1 on there from the start and see how it goes! It is working great with the new hal/pmount stuff. I was using the old hal/pmount stuff on KDE 3.4 which worked really well but the inclusion of pmount was delayed quite a bit for various reasons I won't even go near... I have been looking at the possibility of getting KDE 3.4 working with the new hal/pmount API but that doesn't look as easy as I had first hoped. The KDE bug shows some progress but it is not working yet.


KDE has some great laptop tools too. I am using the battery monitor to take care of power whilst I am on the move, and the kwifimanager to look after my wireless network connections now. Still no sign of working WPA, but I am happy enough with WEP for now. The powernowd daemon is happily clocking down my CPU as I work on ebuilds, LaTeX files for work, data analysis, browsing the web and writing blog entries.

As I got back into digital photography with my new camera I also discovered digikam and digikamimageplugins for storing and manipulating my photos. There is always krita when more features are required too. I am still getting the APIC errors in my log - worrying entries like APIC error on CPU0: 00(40) but it still seems to be running stable.

I got a few new toys delivered to me last week. On Thursday I got a Fuji F10 6.3 MP digital camera which is a really great camera - take a look here for more details. It was recognised as a USB mass storage device without any trouble in Gentoo and I have been doing everyone's head in taking pictures of everything. It is a replacement for my old Sony Cybershot which met its ultimate end on the last night of my stag week in Tenerife... I got a 1 GB xD memory card and a spare battery for it too!

The biggest new toy arrived on Friday though, which is my new Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi laptop, specs are here. This is a great laptop, and I read loads of reviews before purchasing it. As soon as I got it on Friday morning I repartitiioned and starting installing Gentoo on it of course The initial install went fairly well, and I got it to boot without too many problems. Unfortunately it comes with a broken ACPI DSDT so the battery readout was broken - I wish manufacturers would try getting stuff like this right. Fortunately those before me had already fixed this.

I am afraid that laptops don't seem to have gotten much easier to get working... I installed straight from 2005.1 amd64 stages, and built a multilib system. During my research I found a few useful pages scattered across the web with installation details. An Acer 5021NWLCi installation of Gentoo, as well as a user on the Gentoo wiki who installed it on the same model I have here which has been useful in providing quite a few pointers and fixes.

I installed using gentoo-sources-2.6.13 and upgraded to -r1 over the weekend. I had to apply one patch to the kernel - to load the updated DSDT file from an initrd during boot. I am using ndiswrapper to use my broadcom wireless network card, and I have finally managed to get WEP encryption working. I got the Windows XP 64 bit driver from Acer FTP. Unfortunately I have not been able to get wpa_supplicant working so far - any tips greatfully received I also got a new Linksys WRT54GC wireless router to power my new wireless network too.

The integrated memory card reader doesn't work, and it doesn't look like there is much chance of getting it working which is a shame as that functionality would be nice to have. I am getting APIC errors on the CPU which is a little worrying too, but doesn't seem to be causing issues. The touchpad is working great, but I still can't get the bluetooth mouse working reliably either - I think I am missing something here but I need to get back to some real work!

Productivity has been terrible on my PhD work, Gentoo and consultancy stuff whilst getting this laptop working! Hopefully now I will get back to being even more productive.

Saw a few people taking this quiz on Planet KDE and thought I would join in the fun. Shockingly I came out as an atheist! Well nothing new there then...

You scored as atheism. You are... an atheist, though you probably already knew this. Also, you probably have several people praying daily for your soul. Instead of simply being "nonreligious," atheists strongly believe in the lack of existence of a higher being, or God. atheism 88% Satanism 79% Buddhism 46% Paganism 42% Christianity 21% Judaism 17% Hinduism 8% Islam 8% agnosticism 0% Which religion is the right one for you? (new version) created with QuizFarm.com

Today my system locked up yet again, and as far as I can tell this is due to the proprietary Nvidia driver I use and has been present for many driver versions. I keep meaning to look into this problem further and then it gets better and I forget again. I can use the nv driver to get rid of the problem, but lose all 3D acceleration too. How many others have this problem?

After googling it appears that it could be a problem with something in the OpenGL part of the driver, and so I have turned off the OpenGL screensaver I was using as a test. It also seems to be more common when the system is under heavy load too. I have wondered if it might be a problem with TwinView, which I use with my two 17" TFT screens. It is certainly an irritating bug - it is usually necessary to ssh into the system and kill -9 the X process to fix it.

The normal error message accompanying these crashes in /var/log/messages is,
Aug 27 04:48:02 cryos NVRM: Xid: 25, L1 -> L0
Aug 27 04:48:02 cryos NVRM: Xid: 13, 0000 02003900 00000039 00000328 00000000 00000800

After searching on this I found a couple of posts here and here. Also another here suggesting it could be an X86_64 issue here. A post here also indicates very similar issues with Debian. This bug seems to be a similar issue.

I haven't been able to get any more information than the log messages above, and the fact that X gets stuck in a loop consuming 100% of the CPU cycles until it is killed. Not even the keyboard/mouse respond so you need a second system to log in with... I guess this is the problem with a black box binary linked into my kernel - there is no way to debug it. Submitted a bug report to nVidia about a year ago and never received a reply from them.

I have tried enabling and disabling all sorts but nothing seems to change it, and the crashes only happen every day to every few weeks over different xorg-x11 versions and nvidia-kernel versions. It also doesn't affect my work system which is very similar, but only has one TFT screen and a lower end nvidia graphics card...