Technology Blog – obscurus.org
Random Geeking
I have been cleaning up and resurrecting a beast of a computer. Its a dual Xeon 3.16GHz, with 8GB of RAM. Its not that high spec compared with today’s hardware. Has a fairly average GPU and a RAID card with currently 7x 500GB HDs, and 1TB system disk. I think I will get it going. Maybe find a use for it. Perhaps as web scraper or something. That or I could sell it. Gonna have to get a HD off eBay to make up the 8, that and find the Sata PSU cables!
Two of my Opensuse boxes where performing really badly, but only some of the time. I tracked this down to the Baloo file indexing program. This is the tool that indexes your files for search, which is useful but only if it doesn’t cause horrendous performance problems.
The symptoms were a very frustrating desktop performance where the mouse would stutter and every few seconds or so, the system would sort of stop and then start again. It seemed to affect all apps to the point where they were basically unusable. It feels like a constant interrupting of the system, which it might well be.
The solution! Disable Baloo using the following command:
balooctl disable
Then reboot the system and all will be well. I rarely used the file indexing anyway. It would often crash on its own.
So I am not much of a Windows user, I have one Windows machine that doesn’t get used all the much. I tend to use Linux and have done for about 15 years. One of my work machines has caused a bit of trouble. The system was built around the Gigabyte X79-UP4 motherboard. This is on the face of it a good main-board, nice spec, good components. However I have had a lot of trouble with it. Its all about the USB 3 chipset, Linux hates it. The symptoms are as follows:
The solution was to deactivate all the USB 3.0 chipsets on the main-board. The the system behaves itself. I didn’t however discover this very quickly. I first tried replacing the PSU as I thought it had become damaged somehow. I then complained to Gigabyte who asked me to send the board back to them. Which I did at cost to me. They checked the board and said it was fine. They however refused to check the board with any Linux install. It is hard to replace a X79 main-board now. I so I have to continue to use it. I have however installed a PCIe USB 3.0 card that is now running the front ports on my system, and 2 on the back. I tried this board with a couple of difference Linux versions, including Ubuntu 14 and Opensuse 13.3/Leap 42.1. So, this means that I will probably never risk a Gigabyte project again, to risky.
This might have been covered but I wasn’t able to find it easily so I thought I would post it up.
I have been trying to get Lightworks 12.6 working on Opensuse 13.2 and ran into some problems. It would hang on with the loading banner up and not do anything. So I tried running ntcardvt from the command line and got:
./ntcardvt: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.10: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
In Opensuse libcrypto.so.10 is provided by the libopenssl package as /lib64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0
So its both named incorrectly and also in the wrong place for Lightworks to find.
Easy fix, as root make a sym link:
ln -s /lib64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 /usr/lib64/libcrypto.so.10
Seems to work now, although I haven’t tested extensively. I think this will be the same for Leap 42.1 but my normal machine is waiting on a motherboard replacement so I cannot test that.
I have recently bought a vertical mouse for work. This is to help combat a bit of RSI in my arm. Its great, make things much better. So good that I got another one for my other office. Then I hit a snag, the two mice are slightly different versions, one is a Evoluent 4 and the other a 3. This means that mouse buttons mapped differently to functions, and neither of them mapped how I wanted them to map. So… remapping mouse buttons.
First find out which button maps to which number. Easy with a little problem called ‘xev’.
xev | grep button
The command above pops up a window which you can click in, and then filters the output to the command line.
Next look at the output from xinput
xinput -list
This will tell you the ID number of the device you want to remap.
xinput –get-button-map Device_ID
Outputs the button map, you will get something like this:
> xinput –get-button-map 9
1 3 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Then you just remap the buttons that wrong by switch them over, in my case 2 and 3.
xinput –set-button-map 9 1 3 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Finally to make this happen every time you log in put the following in your ‘.bashrc. file in your home directory.
MOUSE_ID=`xinput list | grep -i Evoluent | awk -F= ‘{ print $2}’ | awk ‘{print $1}’`
xinput set-button-map $MOUSE_ID 1 3 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
The first line finds the ID of the device, just in case it changes. The second line maps the keys using the ID.
Easy!
I travel a lot with my job, and therefore I use a range of different wifi networks. These are often secured in different ways and to different standards. Or they aren’t secured at all. I recently suffered a fairly major credit card fraud, and I don’t really know how they got the details. This has made me think that I need to be able to secure my internet activity on my own terms at times.
I have therefore set up my own cloud hosted VPN that I am currently testing. This allows me to encrypt my internet traffic between a cloud server and my laptop even if the network isn’t secure. Once tested I will post up how I have done it. My plan is to have three private VPNs, one in the UK (my home server), one in the US on a Rackspace cloud server, and one in Iceland.
I updated Opensuse 12.3 the other day. Caused a few issues, one was repeated crashes on login to KDE. I seem to have fixed it by adding my user to the ‘video’ group. These is also a fix for the following error.
GL applications report that they can’t operate /dev/nvidiactl.
I have had this error with certain applications trying to use the binary Nvidia drivers. Not sure if the fix is complete yet as the system seems to be a little bit sluggish and if I try to open nvidia-settings it doesn’t work. I will update when I have more info. I might re-install the nvidia drivers and see if that helps.
Update: So nvidia-settings does work, it just takes ages to open.
I had a minor brainwave to reduce the power consumption of my home server. Take out the GPU and use the on-board GPU. This was only recently made possible by the fact that I changed my monitors and the new ones have VGA connectors as well as HDMI and DVI. Something I had failed to connect with the possibility of reducing the home servers power consumption. The upshot is that I would be unlikely to recover the cost of upgrading it to newer parts for a long time as its power consumption is like to be pretty close to any upgraded kit.
Having issues with audio on my new computer. It has HDMI output and an on-board sound card. KDE decided that it would stop playing sound and grey out all the devices. Arrrgh! Sound is frequently a sticking point with Linux. I use Opensuse 12.3 and this is how I force KDE to take another look at the system config to get sound going again.
I re-named the following files:
Renaming them makes KDE regenerate them, that got the devices back for me.
The control of the volume is still a bit flaky. it occasionally deafens me. 🙂
I have recently needed to mount an ext3 formatted partition on my MacBook Pro laptop. Silly me thought all I would need to do is plug it in and at most mount it with the command line. Not so…
First you need to install the new fork of the ext2-fuse module called OSXFUSE. Download and run the install. Make sure you tick the box to install the MacFUSE compatibility layer otherwise you will have problems later.
Next install Fuse-ext2, once done if you plug in a ext2/3 drive it should just mount automatically. Currently it is read only. I restarted my computer after installation but this might not be required. I was due a restart anyway.
Why they can’t include native support for a few more formats I don’t know. Seems very silly not too.