Thursday, 23 May 2013	Dereel	Images for 23 May 2013
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The joys of a fresh installation

Topic: technology, opinion

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It seems that yesterday's boot problems were related to an older version of /boot/loader that didn't properly understand GPT partitioned disks, so it seemed reasonable to install the newer version from the fresh installation instead. Care! The kernel is in the same directory hierarchy—and somehow I had finger trouble and blew my complete kernel directories of the old installation away!

Spent some time looking for a backup, which proved to be incomplete. I'm not as religious about backing up teevee and cvr2 as I am with other machines, in particular because almost the entire disk contents are video recordings, but clearly I should improve. So the only course is to do what I wanted anyway and ensure that the new system would run correctly. And indeed the loader worked as expected, and the machine came up. Next was to get the remote control working. I've always had difficulty with that, and it was helpful to look back on my experiences last November and two years ago—unfortunately, not helpful enough. I had the correct device, the correct configuration file, and the correct invocation, but nothing happened. The messages in /var/log/lircd were subtly different due to the new version of lircd, so I tried running the old version. In each case, nothing came across. Running ktrace on irw showed that it just wasn't reading anything. Hardware problems perhaps? Remote control batteries empty, or sensor not connected? No, the activity LED worked normally, and the probe messages found that the sensor had been detected:

So what is it? I still don't know. About the only other thing that has changed is the kernel. Do we have USB problems in recent kernels? Looks like this will need some serious debugging. It's a good thing that I can get by without the remote control: I can also use the keyboard.

That wasn't the only problem. Various other configuration things needed fixing. I have a custom version of mplayer, so I moved that across from the old system. But running the invocation script was surprising:

Syntax error at line 1? That reads:

And looking at line 41 didn't help much either:

Well, not at first. Looking more closely, there was indeed a missing quote at the end: it should read

The RCS control files show that that error had been there for at least a year. It seems that the shell is now finding errors that it somehow missed before.

One of the things that I had expected from the new system was better browser support. Sure enough, Chrome and Opera started up with no trouble beyond the fact that I can no longer find home pages for these browsers. But when I clicked on the firefox menu, nothing happened. Incorrect name? Should I have called it firefox21? Tried running it from the command line: no, it's really firefox, but it didn't behave as expected:

Doesn't that give you the warm, fuzzy feeling that everything is under control? Decided to recompile it on stable-amd64. More segmentation violations:

So I installed the firefox package from the FTP site. Version 20, now out of date. Not so much an issue in itself, but every time it starts, the damn thing has to tell you so and offer to do what it can't, to install a newer version.

Somehow all this should be easier. Not for the first time I wonder why I stick with FreeBSD. But there's a good answer. To misquote Jawaharlal Nehru:

FreeBSD is good. I say this because other systems are worse.

Other minor issues included not starting the xterms when X starts, and Emacs not reading in its configuration files. Those were both path issues: for some reason, I explicitly requested /usr/local/X11R6/bin/xterm in the startup files, and now it's /usr/local/bin/xterm. In the latter, I had ~/.emacs pointing to (NFS mounted) /dereel/home/grog/.emacs where it should have been /eureka/home/grog/.emacs. But I'm making progress.

Somebody to weed the garden

Topic: gardening

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The weeds in the garden are getting so out of control that I'm completely discouraged. I've finally decided to call in somebody to do it for me, and today Bentaz (Ben) and Rowan Brooks came along to take a look. Looks like they can do it for an acceptable price, but there's also Jordan Dickinson, who did the pond for us 18 months ago. But hopefully we'll have the garden looking a lot better soon.

Friday, 24 May 2013	Dereel	Images for 24 May 2013
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More installation refinement

Topic: technology, opinion

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More work on the new teevee today. Most of it was mundane, but I finally solved my lirc problems. The most obvious recognition is that running irw with ktrace is not useful: it just talks to lircd via a socket, and it's lircd that decides what to send. Running lircd with ktrace proved that yes, indeed, it was reading from /dev/uhid0, not surprisingly exactly what I saw two years ago. So it looks like a configuration issue after all. Went looking at the configuration file, and discovered that I hadn't installed the correct version after all: no reference to the dvico keycodes at all. And yet lircd had happily fired up and claimed to be running in dvico mode. How can that work? It seems that the configuration information for individual remote controls are stored subdirectories of /usr/local/share/examples/lirc/remotes, in my case /usr/local/share/examples/lirc/remotes/dvico/lircd.conf.fusionHDTV, and /usr/local/etc/lircd.conf should have had a line like

But it didn't, and lircd didn't complain. I wonder what it thought it was doing.

I could have made that change, but based on prior experience I preferred to try my existing (correct) configuration file first. And sure enough, that worked. Clearly a couple of mistakes on my part. But what kind of software pretends to work when its configuration information is missing?

eBay strangenesses

Topic: general

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A notification in the mail today (“You have mail”): a package to pick up from Napoleons post office, my personal signature required. I wish people wouldn't do that: it's a 40 km round trip, which costs money. Off to find that it was a watch I had bought on eBay on Monday—it had arrived from Hong Kong after only 4 days. But this one seems to been sent by a more expensive method—it actually had stamps on it, to a value of $21.10, about $2.80 Australian. By contrast I'm waiting—again—for an order of batteries, this time ordered 11 days ago.

Powerline Ethernet speed

Topic: technology, opinion

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I've come to terms with the fact that my TP-Link TL-PA411 powerline Ethernet adapters will only give me a transfer rate of about 7 to 7.5 MB/s in real world applications, despite the claim of 500 Mb/s. Even under ideal conditions I haven't got more than 100 Mb/s out of them. But today, for some reason, the transfer speed dropped from 7 to 5 MB/s. Why? Nothing else had changed. Suggestions were made that it might be due to electrical motors, which is plausible, given that it's now colder and the air conditioners are running almost constantly. To be observed.

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