Any use of the phrase “science project” or “toy rocket” or “hobbyist” with regard to ULA and SpaceX at this point will identify the user as either clueless or disingenuous. Certainly no one worth paying attention to, at least on the subject of space policy. Note, this is a comment spurred more by the commentary over at Space Politics than anything in particular here. It was just a perfect storm. 
Category Archives: Administrative
Continuing Video Driver Problems
OK, so after bollixing things up by installing Nvidia’s third-party drivers, I removed them, uninstalled the X server, and then reinstalled it, in the hope that it would clean things up. I also reinstalled the akmod-nvidia package. But I can’t get X to run. Here is the error I get: Continue reading Continuing Video Driver Problems
Computer Problems
OK, so I decided to upgrade my video card in my Fedora 11 box. But when I fire it up, it won’t load X, or even boot. I look up what to do, and the instructions seem to say to install the latest Ndivia video drivers. So I put the old card back in and do so. Still no joy. So I put the old card back in, and this time it won’t even boot with the old card.
OK, so I have to somehow undo what I’ve done. But I can’t boot the machine.
Here is the problem. The machine pays no attention to keyboard commands during boot (e.g., I cannot get into the BIOS with DEL.) Which means that I can’t tell it to boot at a lower level to bypass X. In other words, I cannot boot.
Well, OK. So I burn a DVD of Fedora 13, and figure I’ll just rescue and upgrade at the same time.
But the Fedora DVD doesn’t recognize my keyboard either, until after it gets into the upgrade process, so I can’t just do a rescue. So I go ahead and upgrade. It says all the packages are installed, and reboot. I reboot, and it still can’t boot, because apparently the upgrade didn’t fix the video problem. And because I don’t have keyboard at boot, or even DVD initialization, I still can’t boot into terminal mode to fix the problem. I tried loading Knoppix, but I can’t figure out how to use it to see the Fedora drive. When I try to mount the drive, it says it doesn’t recognize the lpm2vp filesystem type.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
[Tuesday morning update]
OK, I’m updating from the machine using Knoppix, and I’ve mounted the drive. Now I just have to see if I can figure out what to do to fix it. Ideally, I’d uninstall the drivers that I installed, but I don’t have yum available in this mode, so I’m going to see if blacklisting Nouveau will fix it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Dang. Nouveau is already blacklisted (it must have happened automagically when I installed the Nvidia drivers). Now I don’t know what to do to fix the problem.
[Update early afternoon]
OK, so I can boot into runlevel 3. I can’t bring up eth0 (it says that the device is not managed by NetworkManager — Google provides no clue as to what the problem could be), so I have no network connectivity with the box. When I telinit 5, it tells me that it’s disabled the nvidia drivers because it’s missing the nividia.ko for the new Fedora 13 kernel. The default driver in xorg.conf is vesa. As it continues to try to get to runlevel 5, it flashes a few times, but then quits. And the last line it displays is “Starting NMB services” which is says failed. It then just sits there until I ctrl-C out of the attempt, at which point I’m back to runlevel 3.
Any ideas?
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, the good news is that the machine is bootable, so in the last resort I can just back up /home and do a clean install.
[Update a few minutes later]
Hoorah! I stopped NetworkManager, and brought up eth0, and I now have an ssh connection to the machine from my laptop, so I have a place to back up. Though I’m starting to think that I should just go out and buy a new drive for a clean install, and then copy files over to it, and use the old drive for a mirror.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, I removed akmod-nvidia, but I still get the same behavior when trying to telinit 5, and it still hangs at “Starting NMB services.”
[Update a while later]
Success! Almost. I reinstalled the nvidia drivers, following the instructions for Fedora 13, including editing grub.conf to blacklist nouveau. Then I shut down, put in the new video card, and rebooted. This time, when I telinited 5, it finally came up. The only problem now is that the screen isn’t displaying fully (that is, there is an inch of so of black on each side and a half inch top and bottom on my 22: LG monitor). Also, the highest resolution available from screen preferences is 1280 x 1024 (and I’m actually using 1280 x 720 to better match my screen ratio). I’m looking at the monitor manual to see if there’s anything I can do to enlarge the display, but I may also have to hack the X config file to get higher res. I assume that I can now reset the default to boot into level 5.
Site Update
You may not notice anything, but I just updated WordPress to the current version.
Unfortunately (and this is kind of a disaster), I can’t see to type new posts. The text in the text box is white on white. Anyone know what the problem might be?
[Mid-afternoon update]
OK, per a comment, I fixed the stylesheet for the administrator, and I can now see these words as I type. That’s a dumb bug. You’d think they’d have fixed it by now.
WordPress Spam-Free
I installed it a few weeks ago, at someone’s suggestion. It is a complete failure, as far as I’m concerned. I have seen no diminution of spam from it. The only improvement is that I get more information about them in the email notification. Moveable Type used to have a feature that automatically blocked an IP address that posted more than X comments in less than Y time. This seem like a no brainer to me. Why can’t WordPress do it?
Or maybe it does, but I have to upgrade to the latest version? Anyone know?
Computer Problem Update
Just in case anyone was curious as to the resolution of my computer issues, I haven’t had a hiccup since I swapped the memory sticks with each other. I still can’t get into the BIOS, though, not that I have any immediate need to. I can live with it as is for a while.
Computer Problems
I’m running Fedora 11 on my primary desktop. The mobo is a couple years old. Lately, it’s started randomly freezing, or occasionally shutting itself down without warning. I was going to run memtest on it, but I can’t even get into the BIOS to change the boot sequence. I hit “del” repeatedly during boot, but it ignores me and always goes to the hard drive. Does anyone have any suggestions (other than just upgrading the board, processor and memory, which I’m considering…)?
[Wednesday morning update]
For those asking, no, it is not a wireless keyboard.
And so far, I’ve had no problems since swapping the memory sticks.
Thank You
…to whomever purchased the big screen via my Amazon link. As it turns out, I could really use the money right now. I’m in between gigs, and things are tight, though I’m hoping that will change soon.
Greased Lightning
I’ve been suffering with a crummy DSL connection for months, since the move back to CA (I’ve had to reboot the modem often, because it seems to slow down and start dropping packets periodically, with multi-second delays on pings). But yesterday, Verizon fiber finally came to the house.
This is real broadband, for the first time at home. It’s like night and day, in terms of page loads and video.
[Update a few minutes later]
No, I don’t know why the date is wrong. I did the test today. Maybe I should try a different site.
[A couple minutes later]
Bandwidthplace says that it’s about 4 Mbps up and 15 down.
Comments Issues
Since several people have had trouble commenting, I’ve removed my blacklist, at least temporarily, to see if that clears up the problem. I hope it doesn’t result in a deluge of spammers.