I got up early this morning, flew to El Paso, and then drove up to Alamagordo to the space history museum. In Las Cruces now. I’ll check in from the event tomorrow.
Category Archives: Administrative
Fedora Question
I was thinking of upgrading to 22, and I belatedly discovered that I was still running 20. Do I have to fedup to 21 first, or can I safely just go straight to 22?
[Update a while later]
OK, just discovered why I’m running 20 when I thought it was 21. All this time I’d been thinking that I was booting from my SSD, but it turns out that I’ve been booting from my hard drive, with the older OS on it. I went in to change the boot order, and I can’t find the SSD. The OS can see it with pvdisplay, the BIOS shows it in system status, but it doesn’t appear anywhere in the boot menu. Anyone have any idea what’s going on, or how to get it to show up?
[Update a few minutes later]
Wow, weirder and weirder. I unplugged the hard drive, then rebooted. It booted with the SSD. I went back into the BIOS, and now the SSD is a boot option. I made it highest priority, then shut down and plugged in the hard drive again. Now in the BIOS the hard drive won’t show up as a boot option. Which is OK, because I didn’t want to be booting from it, but it seems like strange behavior from the BIOS.
Anyway, I’m booted into 21 now, and doing a ton of updates. It had been booting from the wrong drive for weeks, and I hadn’t realized it.
Light Posting
I’m at the AIAA Space 2015 Conference in Pasadena through tomorrow. A lot going on, and not a lot of time to blog. A lot of useful inputs to the Kickstarter project here. Probably back to normal on Thursday.
Still On The Road
We started heading back from Denver yesterday. Spent the night in Durango (where we had what seems to be a new Colorado cuisine — Nepalese), and heading down through Monument Valley this morning, with plans to end up for the night at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Not sure what connectivity will be like there.
[Sunday-morning update]
I had connectivity in the park via my phone, but decided to just relax. If you have only been to the south rim, I highly recommend the north. It’s more spectacular, in my opinion, and much less crowded, due to the fact that it’s much more remote, and can’t just be driven through. In Phoenix this morning, and headed back to LA a little later. Back to business as usual then, except I’ll be headed up to the New Space conference on Wednesday.
Forecast: Light And Scattered Blogging
We’re heading out to Colorado tomorrow for a business vacation, including meetings about the project in the Denver area. We’ll be staying in Vegas tomorrow night, where rumor has it they’ll have fireworks (as they probably will in more abundance on Saturday, the actual 4th). The plan is to be back in LA by the twelfth.
It’s actually the first driving vacation we’ll have been on in the west (not counting California only) in years. I’ll take a laptop, and I’ll probably be checking in, but we’ll be spending a lot of time in the car, so blogging will be sporadic.
Light Blogging
I’ve already started to work on the project (even though I don’t get the money for a couple weeks). Re-reading the depressing NRC report from last summer. It will be my point of departure for the remix.
CPU Fan
The noise is driving me nuts. It rattles and ticks, and sounds like it’s about to fail. It’s just a few months old. I pulled the cooler assembly off, and removed the fan, and replaced it with an older one. I kept the heat sink, because the older one was about half the size and cooling capacity. But the old fan makes similar noises. I’ll go buy a new one at Fry’s, but I wonder if something else is going on.
[Update a while later]
OK, it’s not the fan. I stopped it momentarily, and there was no change. The question is: What is it? I can’t figure out exactly where it’s coming from. I only have one physical hard drive hooked up, and it’s not in the case.
[Update a while later]
OK, I changed power supplies. It’s better, though the noise is still there, and it’s not coming from the power supply. Still can’t quite isolate it. It’s now more of a steady ticking. It was doing it at 2 Hz or so, and now sounds like maybe 10, and not as loud.
[Update a while later]
This makes me wish I had a stethoscope.
[Sunday-afternoon update]
OK, got a stethoscope. The sound is not coming from anywhere or anything on the motherboard. I only hear it when I touch the case itself, and it seems to be being transferred through the metal. Still no clear where it’s coming from.
[Bumped]
[Update a while later]
I picked the case up off the desk, and the sound changed slightly. I set it back down, and it’s changed a little again. But whatever was rattling is still rattling. I feel like I may have to pull the board and reinstall. Part of the problem is that the front edge of the board doesn’t have much support, due to configuration.
[Monday-morning update]
OK, when I push the case away from the motherboard, it gets a little quieter.
[Early afternoon update]
OK, starting to think it is supernatural. I tried recording it, so people could hear what I’m talking about, but nothing came out. It was like that old tape in The Sixth Sense. But I upped the mike gain, and aimed it better (it’s my headset, which is pretty directional), and now you can hear it, if you crank up speakers. It’s about a 3Hz resonance.
[Wednesday-afternoon update]
I FOUND IT!
There is a huge case fan in the front that I had previously been unaware existed. It turned out to be impossible to R&R, due to being trapped behind a riveted drive cage. So I just unplugged it. The bad news is that I now know how loud my PSU and CPU fans are. But it’s still a huge improvement. White noise instead of rattling.
[Bumped]
OK, Different Computer Question
I’ve got her machine set up as Windows native, installed on SSD. Her old Windows drive, with her old files, is hooked up to it. She can see it fine from Windows. But while she was using Linux, she’d been writing to an LVM drive, which was originally a backup, but now has some changes on it from the old drive.
I’m running Fedora as a virtual machine, and it seems to be running fine (so far). I’ve attached the old Windows drive to the physical machine, and it shows up in Nautilus and other file managers. But when I try to access it, I get a message that it’s an NTFS drive with problems, and I can only mount it read-only. It suggests I repair.
So, is this caused by the fact that its already mounted and in use by Windows? Seems a little strange, since the virtual machine probably wouldn’t know that. Windows doesn’t have a problem with it. Bigger question: Can/should I try to repair it as an unmounted drive from the virtual machine using e2fsck? That is, does e2fsck repair NTFS drives? And what is the risk if I don’t attempt to back it up first?
OS Follies
Sound works fine in Fedora. Sounds works fine in Virtual Windows machine running in Fedora. Boot native into Windows 8.1, and no sound. Windows troubleshooter says there’s no problem. I’ve updated the Realtek drivers. Everything looks great on Windows, except no sound out of the speakers. And of course, Fedora running virtual on Windows doesn’t have sound, either, because it only sees what Windows sees.
She wasn’t happy running Windows as virtual in Fedora, but that seems to be the only way to get sound.
[Friday-afternoon update]
Well, I’ve sort of solved the problem, but it’s still not right. I unplugged from the rear, and re-plugged into the front jack, and RealTek sees it now. For some reason, it’s not seeing line out in the rear, even though it works fine in Linux. So we have sound, but it’s sort of a PITA to have to use the front jack, and keep the door open.
[Bumped]
[Update a while later]
Well, this is apparently not an uncommon problem.
Went to the MSI web site to download the latest RealTek driver, and it doesn’t recognize the hardware. So current MS driver may be the best I can do until they update.
Video Issues
OK, Linux people. Blender will let me make to edit and export a video as an AVI JPEG, but it refuses to export the synched audio to it. However, it will export the audio by itself as a .flac.
Does anyone know any separate tools that would allow me to synch that audio file with the video?
[Update a while later]
OK, VLC sort of works. Problem is that for some reason it really messes up the title when I add audio. If I were to post the MP4 and .flac files, could someone else try to synch them?
[Update late afternoon]
OK, I tried this:ffmpeg -i RoadToMars.wav -i 0001-9000.avi RoadToMarsAudio.avi
Continue reading Video Issues