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    Posted on 19-07-08, 19:54
    Stirrer of Shit
    Post: #482 of 717
    Since: 01-26-19

    Last post: 1525 days
    Last view: 1523 days
    Posted by BearOso
    I was explaining the proliferation of free Windows compilers, which you don’t seem to understand. It isn’t because of the desire for cross-compilation. Since you’re pretending to ignore information, I assume you understand now, but just want to argue.

    No, I don't want to ar–
    Shit.


    There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
    Posted on 19-07-09, 01:23 (revision 1)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #429 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
    Last view: 15 hours
    So, today I wanted to plug my fancy ol' 4:3 IBM T120 display to my (kinda broken) Asus laptop.

    Normally you plug the display, whatever video driver is running your PC reads the display EDID, then parses it and tells that this display can go up to 1600x1200@60Hz. Normally. But since all I have is broken computers, the VGA port on my Asus does seem to have nerfed DDC lines (maybe collateral damage from The Great Hardware Loss which killed the HDMI port on this thing). That means that I'm limited to sucktastic 1024x768 blurriness.

    Under Windows (and depending on your GPU drivers), you may be able to either specify a custom EDID dump, play custom video modes fuckery, or -if you're lucky- your display OEM may have supplied you with a device driver that tells Windows to ignore whatever EDID has to say and that this baby can actually go up to 1600x1200 any day of the week, not only on sunny Thursdays.

    Under Linux, these are your options:

    - If you have a nVidia card using the blob, this is surprisingly easy: you're already using something that resembles a xorg.conf (to force Xorg to use the blob instead of silly Nouveau). Just add the relevant CustomEDID line for your desired head, restart X, done (I've had to do it at $FORMER_WORKPLACE, as finding a non-broken VGA cable with the DDC pins wired inside was next to impossible)

    - If you're using KMS (that is, i915 or radeon... or if you're unlucky, nouveau), now things become more complex. You're not supposed to rely on Xorg for faking/reading EDID from a file, instead you must go through the kernel. There is a boot/module parameter (drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware, which in newer kernels has been shortened to just drm.edid_firmware... despite EDID not being firmware AT ALL!). Put your EDID files somewhere at /lib/firmware, update your GRUB settings, reboot and... what the fuck do you mean you can't read that tiny 128 byte blob?! Ah, right, we're doing early KMS, which means we have yet to mount our root filesystem and instead we're living at the initial RAMdisk! You have to figure out how to include your EDID blobs on your initrd. Long short story: welcome to the joy of whipping up your own hook scripts, like an ANIMAL:
    #!/bin/sh
    # /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/include-edid-data

    PREREQ="udev"
    prereqs()
    {
    echo "$PREREQ"
    }

    case $1 in
    prereqs)
    prereqs
    exit 0
    ;;
    esac

    . /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hook-functions
    # Begin real processing below this line

    EDID_PATH="/lib/firmware/edid"

    for edid in ${EDID_PATH}/* ; do
    copy_file firmware "$edid" "$edid"
    done

    exit 0

    (had to modify a somewhat popular script out there since 1- it was ugly, 2- it implied you're using a single EDID which may or may not be your case, and 3- it didn't really worked)
    Then rebuild your initrd (update-initramfs -k <your kernel> -u), and reboot.
    ...except that for whatever stupid reason, Xorg still refuses to go over 1024x768, yet it can now tell I have a <garbled name> 20" display! FUCK. And it seems that none of this will work if you hotplug your display (which is expected from a freakin' laptop VGA port!!!)

    - Force it with xrandr: add the missing video mode:
    xrandr --newmode "1600x1200_60.00"  161.00  1600 1712 1880 2160  1200 1203 1207 1245 -hsync +vsync
    xrandr --addmode VGA-1 1600x1200_60.00

    You're going to have to do it anyway, no matter the case as the kernel knows better than you.

    But you can avoid all this unnecessary headache by using non-broken computers and cables where all of the expected signal pins are actually wired inside. Don't be me, guys :/

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 19-07-12, 19:22
    Dinosaur

    Post: #436 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
    Last view: 15 hours
    Operation "To Buster or bust!" starts!

    The craptacular CANTV DSL decided to give me a truce last night, so I took advantage of that to start moving my gear to the latest stale shiny. The first target is the machine I use the least nowadays, my IBM TV box (remember: 686-pae, 32-bit can't die even if they're killed with fire).

    After downloading ~1.2GiB of packages, the update took like 2 hours or so (complete with a HDD error after the first reboot, yet a subsequent 2-hour SMART selftest gave the typical politician speech "everything is FINE!". Ah well, I still had plans to clone this thing anyway...), everything actually worked fine (even Plymouth properly applied the newer bootsplash before the first reboot, still on the backported Stretch kernels!).

    I didn't had to redo my LIRC settings despite the jump on minor version number (unlike my Jessie->Stretch upgrade). Modify lightdm configuration to reenable autologon (this is a TV, you're not supposed to logon with a password on those!), check that the TV tuner still works (it still does, and the tuner can is still busted, thanks to Interdeepfryers®)

    And then... ALSA broke because Pulseaudio happened.

    Before you guys get your Poetteringware hateboners at full blast, let me tell my setup at home. Yes, I don't mind Pulseaudio... on my laptops, with their dinkyass AC'97/HDA codecs. But then, this specific setup HAZ a Real Sound Card™, a good ol' SB Live! (EMU10K1), which while still bundling one of said dinkyass AC'97 codecs somewhere in the DAC/ADC path, it is neatly concealed behind a honest-to-God DSP, complete with a hardware mixer (remember when computers used to have serious muscle on their sound subsystems?). Why in the hell would I need the services of Pulse when I have a perfectly good piece of hardware that lets me have 32 threads in simultaneous ghettoblaster concert at the same time without the need of extra software?!

    In the past, disabling Pulseaudio on Debian was trivial (and with that approach, you could even re-enable it back should you ever need to use its services for whatever reason). But that setup no longer works with Buster. Ha, audio is now busted! Even worse, since developers and distro maintainers know better than you, there is no way to kill the PA daemon while ensuring it stays dead (another thing that doesn't die when killed - maybe we need a F/SN-based Linux distro?). No, "autospawn = no" does nothing on client.conf, and I can't be assed to research why. I just wanted my goddamned EMU10K1 back!

    Anyway, turns out that you need to undo the instructions on that Debian wiki, and purge the pulseaudio package (which contains the daemon/client):
    dpkg-divert --rename --remove /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/pulse.conf
    dpkg-divert --rename --remove /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/99-pulseaudio-default.conf.example
    dpkg-divert --rename --remove /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/50-pulseaudio.conf
    apt-get purge pulseaudio

    # If needed, also delete /etc/alsa/conf.d/99-pulseaudio-default.conf.example, if it still exists

    Reboot, and let your voice be heard~
    (you WILL need to redo your mixer settings, hope you have a screenshot or something! Don't be like me...)

    One system done (but that was EASY MODO), two to go...

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 19-07-12, 21:07
    Custom title here

    Post: #561 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
    Last view: 1 day
    Posted by tomman

    And then... ALSA broke because Pulseaudio happened.

    Awww yeah, that's what we're here for!


    Before you guys get your Poetteringware hateboners at full blast...

    "Before"? Our Poetteringware hateboners are ALWAYS at full blast.

    Why in the hell would I need the services of Pulse when I have a perfectly good piece of hardware that lets me have 32 threads in simultaneous ghettoblaster concert at the same time without the need of extra software?!

    So you can redirect sound to a sound device on a different computer across the internet, obviously. Isn't that how everyone uses their computer?

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 19-07-12, 22:45
    Stirrer of Shit
    Post: #495 of 717
    Since: 01-26-19

    Last post: 1525 days
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    You have trouble with getting your PulseAudio to stay off? Mine has trouble staying on. Whenever I run out of memory, it dies, and I have to run `pulseaudio &` to get it to turn back on again - it can't do it itself, and the recommended way (start-pulseaudio-x11) fails with a cryptic error message.

    Posted by CaptainJistuce
    So you can redirect sound to a sound device on a different computer across the internet, obviously. Isn't that how everyone uses their computer?

    Well, that's equivalent exchange for you. If you remove one such protocol, another must take its place. X is more disgusting than PulseAudio, so I think we got a good deal.

    There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
    Posted on 19-07-13, 00:12 (revision 1)
    Custom title here

    Post: #565 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    " Well, that's equivalent exchange for you. If you remove one such protocol, another must take its place. X is more disgusting than PulseAudio, so I think we got a good deal. "

    PulseAudio doesn't replace X11. It runs ALONGSIDE X11. You're not removing one such protocol, you're just doubling down.
    And, well, X11 has never been concerned with audio even before everyone broke network transparency. If X had actually contained audio support, all the Unixes and their clones would be in a much better place today, audio-wise. There'd be ONE overly-complicated stack of easily-broken software to contend with instead of two.

    Anyways, streaming audio over the network is a niche use and should not be baked into the sound stack by default. It should be an extension or an additional shim on top of the rickety jenga tower that is Linux audio.




    I don't disagree that X11 is kind of a mess, especially for modern usage patterns. But network transparency WAS a key feature of the task it was originally designed for. Much of the system's complexity, in fact, is because of the usage it was designed for. The real problem is people using X Windows for something it wasn't intended to be, a graphical interface for a single-user computer with no remote processing, and kludging new paradigms on top of it instead of creating something new.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 19-07-13, 11:32
    Stirrer of Shit
    Post: #498 of 717
    Since: 01-26-19

    Last post: 1525 days
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    Well, for sure. X11 is for graphics and PA for audio, completely unrelated. My point was just that you've got equivalent exchange going on. Remove one ugly remote control protocol, another one appears.



    There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
    Posted on 19-07-13, 11:40
    Custom title here

    Post: #568 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    Except it wasn't an exchange. X11 was not removed when PulseAudiargh was added. It was just another festering boil. The bright spot was that it only infested Linux instead of all the Unix clones, derivatives, and knockoffs, but really that just aggravated the "develop for Linux and screw portability" issue that'd already ripped through the community so even THAT wasn't a win.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 19-07-13, 12:14
    Full mod

    Post: #300 of 443
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 863 days
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    That's the ##BBoard for you, taking light-hearted, whimsical metaphors and analysing them to dust.

    Just, please let Sway get into Debian before X11 disappears completely.

    The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.
    Posted on 19-07-13, 12:19
    Stirrer of Shit
    Post: #499 of 717
    Since: 01-26-19

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    Posted by CaptainJistuce
    Except it wasn't an exchange. X11 was not removed when PulseAudiargh was added. It was just another festering boil.
    I mean it in the abstract sense; the level of suck remains constant.
    https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EquivalentExchange

    The bright spot was that it only infested Linux instead of all the Unix clones, derivatives, and knockoffs, but really that just aggravated the "develop for Linux and screw portability" issue that'd already ripped through the community so even THAT wasn't a win.
    Not sure that's all bad. If you don't need to worry about portability you can develop much faster, and if your application would reach any level of success you can fix it then, or hope some *BSD user does it.

    Personally, I think PulseAudio is solidly okay. The only non-"audio goes out from computer and straight into headphones without modification" use-cases I've had with it involved remapping the right channel to the left and downmixing to mono, and both of those worked fine.

    It has some kinks, but most of them have either resolved themselves with time or are too small to worry about.

    There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
    Posted on 19-07-13, 12:43
    Custom title here

    Post: #569 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    Right, well, my only excuse is I didn't watch Fullmetal Alchemist and try not to ever look at TVTropes.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 19-07-13, 13:21
    I can't use these things together!

    Post: #297 of 598
    Since: 10-29-18

    Last post: 86 days
    Last view: 2 hours
    Posted by CaptainJistuce
    Right, well, my only excuse is I didn't watch Fullmetal Alchemist and try not to ever look at TVTropes.
    Which makes you smarter than the average user here. At least twice over.
    Posted on 19-07-14, 01:00 (revision 1)

    Post: #148 of 210
    Since: 10-29-18

    Last post: 1638 days
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    Googleanem vs. people who are sure and have knowledge....I'd say it's starting to get old, but I'd be making a gross understatement.
    Posted on 19-07-15, 20:14
    Stirrer of Shit
    Post: #506 of 717
    Since: 01-26-19

    Last post: 1525 days
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    Argh, why aren't there any good epub readers for Linux?

    mupdf doesn't support zoom and links, so that's right out
    Calibre mutates your epub files without prompting, which is icky. I also think it's bloated
    Atril is the best of the bunch, but it has graphical issues (the scroll bar on the side doesn't clear, so it sort of leaves a trail), and it opens external links as if they were another chapter of the book (big no-no)
    It also has some minor issues, like not selecting the text in the search field when hitting CTRL-F (e.g. if I've searched for "asd", and open it up again and type blindly, it'll have "asdblindly" in it), and associating to .webp files without actually being able to open .webp files. The GNOME project even said it has poor code quality.

    Any others? I'm on stretch, but I got the latest version from backports and it had the same issues.

    There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
    Posted on 19-07-18, 04:16 (revision 1)
    Post: #54 of 77
    Since: 10-31-18

    Last post: 951 days
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    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20390708
    https://github.com/johnfactotum/foliate does this work?
    >A simple and modern GTK eBook reader https://johnfactotum.github.io/foliate/
    Posted on 19-08-18, 17:44
    Dinosaur

    Post: #489 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

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    Moving on with the Stretch->Buster, one computer at a time: today is the turn for the Dell laptop.

    MATE is already FUBAR since the GTK3 infestation, and I don't really care anymore, so why keep postponing the upgrade? Let's do it, computers are broken forever, and me living with broken things are the way of life. Communism, etc. Right now, I'll have to read a kilometric changelog (I'll need to reindex my non-existing PostgreSQL 10 databases for reasons, as the very first checklist item)

    The very broken Steamlaptop™? That will be for last - I'm very lucky my patchy DSL held for long enough to let me download ~3.5GiB of updates on the Dell in 6 hours! No hurry on this one.

    I spent some time checking stuff on my IBM TV box (after dealing with yet more boot issues thanks to the remnants of the fried TV tuner/capture card, and the SB Live! that usually decides to shit all over the PCI bus once in a while). Surprise: HW video decoding now works! Without crashing the box, even!. And no invoking the next tier of ATi driver hell, either!!! (I don't miss "radeon: the kernel rejected CS", followed by the GPU assploding its guts all over whatever it's plugged into the DVI port)

    The good:
    - 720p is fairly stable, CPU load is minimal, as expected.
    - I can actually play another video AFTER playing the first one, without having the kernel to enter Lunatic Mode.

    The bad:
    - It only works in mpv, and only when using --vo=vaapi --hwdec=vaapi (--vo=gpu causes some weird GL error, falling back to slowass software decoding). VLC is hopeless, and on anything not using proprietary blobs, VDPAU is emulated trhough some compatibility layer over GL/VAAPI that it's slowass as hell and still falls back to softdec anyway, so it isn't worth using.
    - 1080p or 60FPS sources are too much for this HD2600 first-gen UVD failblock.

    The ugly:
    - I got random A/V desyncs due to unknown reasons! Sometimes I get "[ao/alsa] ALSA XRUN hit, attempting to recover...", followed by MASSIVE frame dropping while the video stream tries to catch with the audio stream. Mind you - this is not constant: testing with the same clip yields very different results during successive runs (sometimes it will not drop until the very end, other times it will drop like mad ass crazy). Messing with audio buffer sizes is of no help. Switching audio output drivers don't seem to help: I don't run Pulse on this thing, SDL is more or less the same hell, and with sndio I've get the best results so far, with a couple frames dropped every now and then... but not always. Debian's mpv is not built against OpenAL, so I guess I'll build my own and try.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 19-08-18, 21:47
    Dinosaur

    Post: #490 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

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    Upgrade done.

    Reboot went smoothly (aside of a boot hang, but that's due to this junky ATi videocard on this Dell - the last replacement I bought tends to hang at early KMS or BSOD under Windows every now and then. Yay broken shit~).

    They changed DejaVu Sans, the default font. I had to lower the default size to 9. Looks... weird, but I guess it's just matter to get used to it.

    After the reboot, Qt5 apps were crashing at start. Turns out I had to rebuild my Qt5-GTK2 style lib, as the Qt libs minor version were mismatching. Fortunately qt5ct (the "misssing" Qt control panel for Qt5) is now on the Debian repos starting with Buster.

    Oh, I also lost my sound card this time too - Pulseaudio was claiming that there are no soundcards available! Blame Lennart Timidity!? OH YES, apparently Debian thinks I now need a system-wide software MIDI synth because it's time to party like it is 1991 again, but this time it was grabbing the HDA codec all for itself, leaving no chance to anyone else, including Pulse, to output a single note of noise, or anything at all. "Purge timidity-daemon". Really, if suddenly Pulse says your only sound output is a "dummy out", first aid in this case is "is anything else hogging the soundcard?" (fuser -v /dev/snd/*). Hateboner averted. Twice.

    God bless the Arch Linux wiki - I've never used Arch and have no plans to try it anytime soon, but its wiki keeps saving my ass over and over and over - it's mostly distro-agnostic, which is absolutely great. It should became THE Linux manual, PERIOD.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 19-08-19, 02:31 (revision 1)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #491 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

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    Got UVD/hwaccel working on this fine PoS... sort of.

    First, some background on my previous experiments, courtesy of ye olde bBoard of yesterday: https://helmet.kafuka.org/byuubackup2/viewtopic.php@f=6&t=1265.html

    Long short story: I can't have UVD and DPM working together due to a longstanding kernel bug with those two bits on R600 GPUs. Power saving is nice (it helps protecting hardware from cooking itself), but since noone gave a fuck on R600 and opensource drives (another case of "too little, too late"), it means you have to turn off DPM (it's actually off by default for R600 GPUs) if you actually want to use the HW video decoding features you've paid good money for a decade ago. On the flip side, I can actually play 1080p flawlessly without upsetting the kernel, yay me~! I only have to rebuild my initramfs and reboot each time I want to choose between watching anime OR doing anything else while protecting my videocard. Good for me that I still have plenty of spare fans and thermal paste!

    ...and it only took those Lunix ATi/AMD folks like 10 years to get there! Year of the Linux Desktop™® anyone?

    tl;dr: want the AGP retrobox of your dreams? Get an HD46x0, forget that everything else ever existed. And upgrade to the latest Debian stable for your own sanity, at the very least!

    Oh, don't forget to add -N to your ls alias definition on your .bashrc, otherwise you will get those annoying quotes wrapping any filename with spaces (because that's a Windows-ism that must die, nevermind that the Real World goes beyond Unicrud and its collection of space characters).

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 19-08-19, 03:49
    Full mod

    Post: #321 of 443
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    Posted by tomman
    Oh, I also lost my sound card this time too - Pulseaudio was claiming that there are no soundcards available! Blame Lennart Timidity!?

    Yeah, that bit me once. Once upon a time I installed Timitidy, probably to try out the MIDI soundtracks in ScummVM, and at some point the timidity package started depending on timidity-daemon, which runs at startup and grabs exclusive access to the sound-card. It was super-annoying until I figured it out, but oh well.

    Oh, don't forget to add -N to your ls alias definition on your .bashrc, otherwise you will get those annoying quotes wrapping any filename with spaces (because that's a Windows-ism that must die, nevermind that the Real World goes beyond Unicrud and its collection of space characters).

    Spaces, or other weird shell-meta-characters. I find it quite convenient that I don't have to figure out how to quote whatever weird characters appear in a filename, I can just copy/paste whatever ls prints.

    The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.
    Posted on 19-08-19, 04:00
    Custom title here

    Post: #646 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    Personally, I like the certain unambiguity of quote marks around a file name that contains characters which can have different meanings.
    ...
    Of course, I also still think spaces and select other characters should never have been allowed in file names(without a complete forced-breaking change in parsing), so what do I know?

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
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