Interesting Stuff

My computer is in trouble again. I came back from break to discover that about a million different programs had had new versions released, and I installed updates for them. This was wonderful – OpenOffice has come out with the totally new Version 2.0, which doesn’t suck ass like the older one did. Shockwave/Flash/etc is much more stable. I found a better CD-ripping programme. Life was great.

However, things took a turn for the worse when I started noticing that my right monitor would flash when I typed or clicked too fast (at first I thought it was just the right mouse button that caused this, but I’ve found other ways to cause it as well). I’m almost positive this is a software problem, since this never happens for certain actions and almost always happens for other ones. It’s ridiculous, though. A reboot of XFCE lead to my left monitor not turning back on. Upon a total reboot, I found that this was because the nVIDIA modules could not be loaded (nor could the ALSA modules). When recompiling the modules didn’t help, I decided it’s high time I rebuilt my kernel (I was still running 2.6.10-r4, and the most recent kernel is 2.6.15-r1). After 4 tries, I got a working kernel that could load the modules (although some things are still not back, such as support for smb stuff). When I started XFCE back up, I my background didn’t load, and I couldn’t right click on the desktop to get a menu. Poking around revealed that xftaskbar hadn’t started, but I’ve now gotten that fixed again.

At this point, here are the things that used to work but still don’t:

• smb anything – no browsing, no mounting, nothing.
• sound – the modules are loaded, but ALSA can’t seem to find my sound card. I have to play around with this more.
• The bloody right sceen still flashes when I type/click!

On the other hand, I’m running a much newer kernel, I now have support built in to try out udev whenever I finally run out of broken things to fix, and I believe my kernel now has iPod support in it, which should come in handy.

The thing about Gentoo which I both love and hate is that if you can get something working, it is rock solid and works beautifully. Getting it working in the first place, however, is a pain in the ass.

So, recently, I have been frustrated that Xorg keeps randomly crashing. And I mean, randomly. It has only crashed twice while I’ve been using my computer, but about 5 times while I’ve been out of the room or asleep, with nothing but the screensaver running. I had attributed it to an unstable build of Xorg (I’ve been running version 6.8.2-r0), and waited until a new version was out (6.8.2-r6). However, I couldn’t get it to compile. I looked through the Gentoo forums for help, but no one else seemed to have the same problem as me. Today, I finally decided to start my own thread on the forums about this, when I noticed that the ebuild had failed in a different place than it had failed previously. That was really weird! On a whim, I tried building it again, …and it worked. As I write this, everything on my computer has been updated except OpenOffice, which is in the middle of updating itself. No problems with any ebuilds, least of all Xorg. wtf? I suspect it is a problem with faulty memory, and Mac just backed up my suspicions. We shall see… It’skind of neat being able to spot a hardware problem; I don’t think I’ve ever successfully done that before (though it would be great if I haven’t successfully done that here, either. I’ll find out more later).

BTW, I’ve (sorta) been off polyphasic sleep since Wednesday. I did it for a week, and I believe it can be successfully done for much longer. However, I was only getting a couple extra hours per day to do stuff, so the benefits weren’t as great as I had hoped. On top of that, it’s harder than I expected to schedule naps every 4 hours (they seemed to come in the middle of parties and movies and things), so it was a social inconvenience. Add that to the social inconvenience of swearing off caffeine and alcohol while on the cycle, and the drawbacks outweighed the benefits of it. However, I still seem to get sleepy during the day at certain points, and I took a 20-minute nap in the middle of the Putnam exam (this actually helped – I was getting tired and frustrated, and couldn’t get any of the problems, so I went to sleep. 20 minutes later, I woke up alert and energized, and solved another problem), so I’m not completely back to monophasic sleep yet.