Kevin's musings

Well, all packed up and hopefully everything is arranged for this
weekend. I need to leave for the FINE airport in about 10min,
then fly to dallas. There I meet up with V and C and we get our
rental car and go meet folks for some piles of BBQ. Then to the
hotel for sleep. Will try and take a bunch of pictures and
such.

Whiled the evening away tonight playing around with
software suspend again.
I am running
2.6.6 + software suspend 2.0.0.81
on my laptop. It’s almost all good news. I no longer have to make
sure the ohci-hcd usb module is unloaded, and it even works ok
with cpufreq now. The only module I still have to unload and
reload now is the
prism54 module for my network
card. If I leave it in, the suspend never completes. I can also
suspend and resume with 3d enabled for video and no need to
switch to a virtual console. I can also use all 1GB of my memory
and have preempt support. It’s all looking very good now.

Was a pretty quiet weekend. I did go and see
Kill Bill: Vol 2
again. It was good the second time, although not quite as good as the
first. I will have to watch it back to back with the first one
and see how that works out.

Need to get ready to head down to
Scarborough Faire
this coming weekend. Should be a fun time. Bunch of us gathering
out there for the faire and visiting.

Last night at
hacking society
I upgraded my laptop to the shiny new
fedora core 2 release.
The update itself went fine. It used all 4 of the binary cd’s (I have
a ton of stuff installed on my laptop, I suspect I did a
everything install last time I installed it). The little
splashscreen was pretty boring, there was only one, so not much
to watch while it upgraded.

After the upgrade completed I rebooted and found my first issue. It
had upgraded to the new kernel and removed all my old custom
kernels. I compile my own kernels so I can add in software
suspend2 for my laptop. Luckily, I have all my old kernels as
rpms on the laptop. So, I booted single user and re-installed my
custom kernel and booted from that.

Next issue was the firmware wasn’t loading for my wireless card. Had
to modify the /etc/hotplug/firmware.agent file to make sure and
look in /sys instead of /sysfs. I should submit that as a bug to
the script. Got that working and back on the net.

KDE fired right up, but anoyingly still has the inability to remap the
windows key. I spent probibly several hours playing with
keyboard layouts and xmodmap, and pretty much nothing I did
worked. The Windows key is mapped to pop up the KDE menu, and
thats what it will do. I used to have it mapped to allow me to
use the windows key and the arrows to switch desktops, but not
anymore. Finally gave up and started trying to get myself to use
control-alt-arrows instead. ;(

For some reason the font I was using in xemacs looked like junk under
the new release. Spent a while looking at fonts. Finally settled
for lucida-typewriter for now. Still not great, but will do.

Everything else worked fine from the upgrade. Very smooth. Probibly
one of the easier ones I have ever done. Good work fedora
folks.

I really dig the macro mode on this camera. It does a pretty nice
job. Here’s some
pictures of flowers in the back yard
that I took eariler today.

Since I am running the 2.6.6 kernel on my laptop now, I decided to take a look at
laptop mode
since it’s included in the kernel now. The laptop-mode.txt
readme that comes with the kernel has the approprate scripts in
it, so I copied out the /sbin/laptop-mode script and ran it. I
saw no mention of JFS support in the readme or the script
however, so decided to go look on the net. The
laptop mode
page does say that JFS is supported, but thats it. Digging
around on google got me a discussion about JFS and laptop mode
on the JFS list. Looks like JFS didn’t need any modifications to
work with laptop mode, it just works. So, then I did a
‘/sbin/laptop-mode start’ and a ‘hdparm -S 4 /dev/hda’ to set
the spindown time on my drive low and start laptop mode. Nothing
happened. To figure out what was keeping my drive spun up, I
used: “echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump”. That spews out every
process that hits the disk and if it’s a read/write or a cache
hit. Using that I fixed a few things: Set syslog to not sync
after each log (a – before the filename), closed some firefox
windows that were autorefreshing and writing to cache, setup
syslog not to log my fetchnews jobs on each run. Tried laptop
mode again, but it still wouldn’t spin down. The drive was
inactive as far as I could tell. Perhaps it’s an issue with my
drive somehow, so I looked around a bit more and pulled down
smart_spindown
which is a handy script that checks for activity and then spins down
your drive if there isn’t any. It has backoff so that if things
seem busy it will wait longer and longer to spin it down. Using
that script things spun down and appeared to work ok. Running it
overnight I was able to see up to about 10min of spin down time
at various points, sometimes as little as 30 seconds. I think
this might be worth the savings if you were really hurting for
power, but otherwise seems kinda pointless.

Today was the
gilly girls dancing greyhounds team
event down at the adams county fairgrounds. Here are some
pictures.
I took a bunch more, but it was impossible to keep the camera at all
steady with all the dogs pulling me in 4 diffrent
directions. I did get to talk to some folks I hadn’t seen in a
while, the dogs got a ton of pets. Sounds like things will start
to gear up for the ren faire booth soon.

Went up to Fort Collins for the annual meeting for
CGC. It was a pretty nice laid
back time. They had a Rekki/Healing touch person giving the
talk. Not sure what to think of that, but whatever works for
people. On the way back there was a nasty wreck on I25. They
called in the
helicopter.

Nothing to exciting to report the last few days. Just the regular
routine. Went down to therapy dog class wed night and had a nice
time. Took twyla with me this time and she really enjoyed it I
think. Thursday was
BLUG with dinner before hand
at fiascos. A pretty nice talk from socket about his mailing
list reasearch. Tons of possible things going on tonight: A BBQ
up in Fort Collins, a group of folks possibly meeting in boulder
for drinks/dinner, a group going to the Concrete Blonde show
down at the gothic, a group going to see movies. Of course just
staying home and relaxing sounds good too.

At 5pm today I take kurt in and get his stiches removed. He’s healing
up nicely. Still also looking for a dog/house sitter for
Memorial weekend. Hope I can find one.

Some pictures of
kurt’s wound, shattered glass tables, and snow in mid may.