The display card that I ordered last week is there. For once it's not the fault of Australia Post: it arrived in
Napoleons (sorry,
NAPOLEON) a week ago, just after Yvonne did her shopping, and
since it wasn't urgent, I waited until today.
It's enormous! The package measured 31×43x6.5 cm, or 8.66 l!
Finally the monitor that I ordered last week—a day before the display card—has arrived. I paid for it on Sunday, 14
July, but it wasn't sent until the afternoon of Monday, 22 July. And to make up for that,
it arrived today, less than 2 days after being sent, and it was delivered to my door. Not
bad for free postage.
Now the real work starts: tidying up the monitor arrangement that once
displayed eureka, which has been there for over 9 years:
Writing an email today, I tried to save the buffer. No go:
select-safe-coding-system: Loading charset map: No such file or directory, MULE-uviscii
Huh? What's that? It seems to be related to the fact that the message contained
non-ASCII characters. A bit of a
web search brought this page to light, which helped me work through to discover the
directory /usr/local/share/emacs/30.0.50/etc/charsets/. Previously it
contained MULE-uviscii.map, but now it doesn't. Clearly it relates to my recent
rebuild of Emacs, but how?
I found an older version, and it doesn't look like something that changes frequently, so
putting it in place worked around the problem. But what other issues are lurking in the
shadows?
Ports Collection: well over a quarter of a century of pain.
Spent much of the day moving monitors around. It shouldn't have been difficult, but there
were constraints:
Remove junk accumulated round the old monitors.
No computer to be powered down.
Remove mess from behind the monitors.
Find cables of appropriate length and type to connect to the monitors.
In the process, I found a lot of old documentation, including appointment cards dating back
as far as June 2017. And I managed not to disconnect any cables. Sadly, the power
connector to eureka was loose, so I did have to reboot it—exactly at a time where it
had no monitor connected. But I got things done faster than expected, by midday. Here
before and after:
Clearly not the image quality. Clearly not the aging person between keyboard and chair.
Also not the location, nor the displays. Not even the keyboards, which I had to change
before the last photo. But there is one constant: the monitors are mounted on SPARCstation pizzaboxes. I had long
since stopped using them as computers, but they did very well at propping up the monitors,
and they have been doing it for round 30 years.
The new monitors have their own stands, no SPARCstation needed. And while changing over, it
became clear how much space they had taken up. I now have more space for appointment cards
and things under the monitors. And things look tider from behind too. Here before and
after:
Into Sebastopol today for a haircut. Originally I had planned a whole lot of things, but somehow they
either sorted themselves out, or became unimportant. So a long drive just for that.
The good news about connecting up my new monitor was that it worked out of the box. Of
course, it was connected to a running output (hydra:0.2) configured for 1920x1080,
but it picked that up and ran with it.
That was the good news. I wasn't expecting the reconfiguration to be easy, and my
expectations were met. Although I had an output on the rightmost monitor (to
become hydra:0.3, but currently hydra:0.0), the server and Nvidia software didn't want to know about
it, thus the blue screen on that monitor:
OK, run nvidia-settings. I've been there before, and it wasn't quite as painful.
But once again I couldn't get it to position the screens correctly, and it also wouldn't
save the configuration file where I wanted it to. Finally I saved it, but it was broken.
Despite “finding” the new monitor (“LG Electronics LG ULTRAFINE”), it included the old name
in the configuration file. It knew about the refresh rates, though. Here an excerpt from
the Monitor sections:
=== root@hydra (/dev/pts/32) /usr/ports/editors/emacs-devel 120 -> nvidia-settings === root@hydra (/dev/pts/32) /usr/ports/editors/emacs-devel 121 -> nvidia-settings nvidia-settings: Fatal IO error 22 (Invalid argument) on X server hydra.lemis.com:0.0.
The first invocation worked, but when I did it the second time, some time later, it had
apparently changed something in the server, and I could no longer start the program. It
also apparently reset the mouse bindings and the keyboard map. It wasn't the server itself,
which has been running for well over a month:
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
root 2307 0.0 0.1 25948804 226184 v0 S 15Jun24 4710:04.67 /usr/local/libexec/Xorg :0 -config xorg-0.conf -logverbose 6 -listen tcp -auth /home/grog
So: frob the configuration file manually and check as server 4.
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