Older blog entries for penguin42 (starting at number 5)

Downloaded KDE 1.90 over Friday/Saturday night (wonders of free net calls - even if it does drop the line every 2 hours, something which a retry on wget doesn't mind about).

Built; hit problems. It works fine if you let KDE take over your entire system by letting it start its window manager etc, but not if I just want to run some apps under Gnome - no keyboard input.

Having said that, running it in KDE domination mode seems to work fairly well. Koffice is promising - I wrote a set of slides in kpresenter and it only crashed a few times. (The fact that it stores documents as gzip'd tars of XML files is great when you have to go out and fix something it screwed up).

You can see the result at: www.treblig.org/talks/xfree4

Got about midday.

Found the two X builds nor the EGCS that I had set building over night (over morning?) had built. And I hadn't slept well either. Bummer. EGCS seems to complain about a problem with the definition of RUSAGE something - and this seems to be kernel version dependent.

Got two different failure modes for X with DRI; either X segs internally, or I get a kernel oops in the drm_release code. Great.

Found a way to hang 2.3.99-pre2-5 - open the Gnome window manager configuration. Really odd - it seems pretty stable other than that......

After those hangs, it came to me that I should be using a journalling fs; waiting for a 34GB drive to fsck is just painful.

Went to ManLUG; had a good chat and listened/watched a talk on the GIMP and a rather interesting talk from a nice man at SuSE who was handing out lots of goodies (got a Tux/suse tie/pin - now I just have to work out where to wear it since I don't often wear ties).

Built 2.3.99-pre2-5 on my Alpha and built the sourceforge CVS'd DRI version of X. X ain't happy running with DRI on my Alpha. Hmm.

Vaguely started thinking about an XFree 4 talk I'm going to give in a couple of months - hmm.

Got up at about 12.30 - yawn.....

Built XFree 4.0; works a treat on my Alpha with my Voodoo 3 card; although I know some people are having problems with MGA and Permedia cards. Built GLUT and GLU to go with it and tried one or two examples; uploaded the builds to my ftp site.

Carried on my mods to Elvis for a Gnome front end; managed to get page up/down/home/end working and found a way to get a signal before a menu appears (thus hopefully enabling me to do a buffers menu). Added a 'goto line' dialog box.

Failed to figure out how to trap the closure of dialog boxes when they are closed by the window manager - hmm.

Spent an hour battering pppd into auth'ing itself with BT internet - finally got it to work. Seems fast, but it has the annoying 2 hour disconnect problem.

Built 2.3.49 on my Alpha; this seems good - its fast and hasn't screwed up my disc!

Built Mozilla M14 - well it got a window up; but some parts were unrendered leaving bits of the lower windows showing through, and after a minute or two it fell to bits. Ah Mozilla.

Built 2.3.47 on my Alpha ; spent rest of afternoon recovering disc partition..... Built XFree 3.9.18, patched GLX for alpha.

Tried crossing Niki Waibel's hacked Alpha 3dfx device driver with my hacked Glide code and got the 'test' programs to blink the monitor off and hten hang. Well I suppose that is something -but I'm not sure what.

(Note: Never put a table leg just in front of where it would be really nice to put your monitor...)