Linux

[PluMGMK]

A lot of people read this forum though.

[incognito]

O rly?

[PluMGMK]

Not sure how I did it, but I just finally managed to build a version of Clang that can compile both 32-bit and 64-bit executables!

[incognito]

Good, the pieces I need for the device I'm building are actually on their way, I'll probably take them when I'll head to Europe, thus subsequently means I'll get my hands on a Raspberry Pi, and that I'll be able to make a lot of tests in it such as

-Game recompilation, yeah, wanna have games to play on my devices, wanna play the DooM Trilogy and all the Quakes !
-Android Emulation, I wanna see if I can get Android stuff to run on it.
- Retro Console emulation, heard what I said ? I want portable games !
-Experimental telephone, I wanna test switching to a free device, get a rid of all the smartphone market.
- Window Manager experiments, Yup, awesome Window Manager on a touchscreen test, nuff said !
- Portable vocal assistant, I was firstly gonna make it feminine and call it EVA, but... Too many of these, Fantomex has one of the same name, and so does Havoc in Command&Conquer Renegade, I'll voice it with my super battle droid voice and I'm still searching for a name.
- Body sensors, such as heartrate, temperature, linked to my vocal assistant.
And... actually much much more, it is gonna be endless really

[PluMGMK]

Sounds like a massive project, do you have a good idea about how you'll do all of it?

[incognito]

Yup ! I have spent months working on the plans, and it ain't that complicated after all, what might be a problem though is the android emulation and the vocal assistant, but it ain't gonna set me down
And now I'm thinking about it, even Gordon Freeman has the HEV, which is pronounced as EV if as a single word, which is very close of the above...
The first game I'll run on it will be symbolic.... it will be DooM traditionally the first game to be installed on any platform.
Also BTW late edit :
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20110217.gif

Hey ! I have fully upgraded my Slackware today !
It wasn't without consequences though, I have trouble with the apps I have installed and the shared libraries, also, I think it is because of PulseAudio, but now one of my Alienware's three jack ports doesn't work, but not any trouble with Windows, I bet a quick slice should be enough to kick it on though.

But that aside, everything works pretty flawlessly, with probably some improvements.

[incognito]

I DID IT !!!! I DID IT !!!! NVIDIA WORKS ON MY LAPTOP !!!!!

Now I'd like to get drunk in order to celebrate but.... it is 00:28 and I have no wine...

TWO YEARS.... I tried Two FUCKING years...

The first game I ran on it is... Rayman 3.

[PluMGMK]

Well done!

Speaking of NVIDIA, no kernel I've installed since 4.8-rc2 has been able to load NVIDIA's firmware for the nouveau driver (The error is "gr ctor failed, -2", when it's trying to load sw_nonctx.bin). I suppose I should file a bug report, but I find it hard to believe I'm the only one affected. Though I guess people who use nouveau with GeForce 900-series cards are few and far between, and those among them who try kernel RCs could conceivably be only one or two people…

[incognito]

Well done!

I didn't expected it at all but even my father congratulated me, after all he saw me hitting my computer table and ragequitting for two damn years...

Speaking of NVIDIA, no kernel I've installed since 4.8-rc2 has been able to load NVIDIA's firmware for the nouveau driver (The error is "gr ctor failed, -2", when it's trying to load sw_nonctx.bin). I suppose I should file a bug report, but I find it hard to believe I'm the only one affected. Though I guess people who use nouveau with GeForce 900-series cards are few and far between, and those among them who try kernel RCs could conceivably be only one or two people…

Dear God, your computer must be like some kind of sordid testing chamber...
Also what ? Nouveau and Nvidia ? As far as I'm aware these driver never works together, and they don't do any good when you try to use them both...

[PluMGMK]

Nah, I'm not trying to use the two together, it's just that on these new cards nouveau needs to load some signed firmware provided by NVIDIA (the company). I got that from the linux-firmware repository back in March, and it hasn't changed since. But the newest RCs of the kernel can't load it anymore for some reason.

[incognito]

It wasn't probably compiled with your GPU support, I actually ran into these problems with two kernels I tried.

[PluMGMK]

But I compiled it myself!

[incognito]

So did I ! But for some reason it didn't worked with my GPU !


About my wearable Digital Assistant project, I don't think my conky config could fit a so small screen.
And as an update I'll add that the project is fully on, and currently to stay Anon, a friend of my father is taking care of buying the components online, I'll probably wait to go in Europe to take the pieces, as I'm too afraid of package content to be "lost" during the shipping.

[PluMGMK]

Well, I noticed that I started having issues when I updated my compiler from GCC 6.1 to 6.2. So I decided to compile my current kernel (4.8-rc1) with the new compiler, and found (by using the Intel onboard GPU, obviating the need for nouveau) that it was indeed causing problems. Turns out the kernels I compiled with GCC 6.2 were unable to load modules automatically – modprobe didn't work. Probably a reasonable explanation for this, but I just decided to switch to compiling my kernels with GCC 4.9.4, which I also have installed. But when I did that it turned out the newer kernels couldn't load the NVIDIA firmware anyway, the compiler problems were a completely separate issue! So now it seems I have grounds for a bug report.

[incognito]

What did I said, Kernel problems, I became a Veteran on this...
Anyway, I compiled RBDOOM3 on Slackware tonight, and I came into a problem, the game was compiled flawlessly, but, whenever I was putting the executable inside my Ntfs partition, which contains my BFG DooM 3 files, it couldn't launch, I rapidly established that it came from a permission problem, and indeed, it was.
I then edited my Fstab to change the mount settings of the partition, and I then rebooted.
It works like a dream, and even better than on Windows !
However, I'm still having some problems with wine, I'm unable to launch some games when using Primusrun, which enables my GPU to run them, do you have any ideas ?

[PluMGMK]

Hmm…
https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/how_to_ ... _one_tweet

[incognito]

Heh heh, what did I said about systemD ?
Slackware ftw!

[PluMGMK]

Yep! But now I don't have hours to sink into switching init systems, even on my server.

Also, more generally on the systemD front: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUUbFGNZ1vI
Haven't watched it yet but I probably will.

[PluMGMK]

In the heel of the hunt, I didn't watch that video, but I did get a lot of stuff done since I last posted in this thread.

So it turns out that the reason nouveau couldn't load the firmware was simply that I was compiling the driver straight into the kernel, rather than as a module. (Sort of on the advice of an article in Linux Magazine.) Amazed it took me two months to figure that out, but the issue was clouded by that spell during which I was compiling kernels that couldn't load modules (I'm still not sure what happened there, but since then I have gone back to compiling my kernels with GCC4 rather than 6). I'm not sure if this nouveau issue is a legitimate bug or if there's something I should have been doing to compile the firmware into the kernel. Either way the easiest workaround is obviously to go back to compiling nouveau as a module, as I always did before reading that Linux Magazine article!

The other Linux thing I've been doing is, of course, my GNOME build. I kind of promised to post a little background to explain my motivations, but right now I just want to explain how it went. I can post the background later if anyone's interested. So anyway, I started off just under a month ago, following the instructions at http://linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/s ... gnome.html. Naïvely I thought I might be done before the election, but obviously that didn't happen! Anyway, I was going to be deviating from the instructions slightly, since my system is multilib Cross Linux from Scratch, while the instructions are aimed at pure32/pure64 Linux from Scratch. Also, I was planning on installing a development release of Mutter rather than the stable one, in order to be able to (finally!) use the proprietary NVIDIA driver with Wayland.

It started off reasonably enough. The list of dependencies was huge, but getting, compiling and installing them proved to be a fairly straightforward and robotic process. However, I drew the line at NetworkManager and Bluetooth-related stuff. I do not need to complicate my life with NetworkManager, since I have been using SystemD-NetworkD for almost a year and have had no problems with it. (Conversely, my Ubuntu-based server, since July, has used NetworkManager in conjunction with SystemD, and has given me quite a few headaches.) Also, this is a big desktop gaming rig and will never be in any way Bluetooth-capable, so installing software for that would be utterly pointless. I hit a bit of a snag then when I tried installing GNOME Control Center – apparently, as of version 3.22, GNOME has different ideas about what I do or do not need on a Linux system. Well, FLOSS is FLOSS, so I did something slightly cheeky, and then proceeded as normal:

Normally, I'd worry that playing fast and loose with dependencies could come back and bite me in the proverbial, but this was a clear case of an artificial restriction that could easily be removed.

So anyway, the moment of truth finally arrived. I was ready to start up GDM, the display/login manager. I exited my window manager to get a terminal, put in "systemctl start gdm" and got… a blank screen! Ugh! I proceeded to worry myself senseless by doing silly things like running gnome-session or mutter from a bare terminal. When doing this produced segfaults, I got it into my head that this was a compiler issue (cf. what I said above about GCC4 vs. GCC6) and went mad, recompiling loads of different things on the stack. Turns out these compiler worries couldn't have been further from the truth. The segfaults were simply because I was trying to launch a GNOME Session without GDM running, which is impossible because the environment isn't set up properly. This is what really frustrates me about GNOME tbh, all this stuff fits together so tightly and everything has to be done in a certain order. It's so Windows-like, compared to what I'm used to!

So anyway, I have a laptop which is authorized to SSH in to the PC, so I was able to use that to start and stop GDM and, more importantly, read the journal to see what was going on. I noticed an error, "could not find drm kms device", which, after a bit of grepping in the source code, I realized was coming from Mutter. The Wayland backend was failing to initialize, so it was falling back on X11, which was also crashing because I never set up X11 properly, having never needed it. I figured I was being too risky by using a development release of Mutter, so I downgraded to 3.22. This did indeed fix that error, but unfortunately it was replaced by a different error. I'd love to tell you what it was, but I can't remember. It should still be in the journal, but it seems GNOME has started cleaning that out on a regular basis, thanks a lot! (Seriously, until a couple of weeks ago the journal contained everything that happened since December 22 last! ). The point is, I needed more debug output, so rather than giving myself more headaches by trying to pass environment variables to SystemD services, I simply went into the source code and changed a few lines from "g_debug" to "g_printerr", or something like that, to get the information I needed. I recompiled Mutter and tried again.

It turned out that there were "Access denied" errors coming from DBUS, as Mutter was trying to take control of the display. Looking back in my archives, it seems I installed SystemD on the very first day of building the system (naturally), the aforementioned December 22. I then installed Linux-PAM on December 25 (like I said, I was very Scrooge-like with this project!) according to some rather outdated instructions on the CBLFS wiki, at http://cblfs.clfs.org/index.php/Linux-PAM. Thus, I recompiled Shadow against PAM, but never twigged that I also needed to rebuild SystemD against it. Somehow this never caused me any problems in almost eleven months! I was tipped off, however, by the fact that the page I just linked on rebuilding SystemD was listed as a "runtime dependency" for GDM. I proceeded to recompile SystemD, blending those instructions with these, since I decided to install the same version again instead of upgrading (too risky, even for me!). This went surprisingly smoothly, and I was able to link against things like Glib and LibGCrypt, which I hadn't installed until much later than December 25!

Was I then, finally, able to start GDM, and therefore GNOME? Well, not quite. The serious errors above were replaced with a rather annoying one, "JS ERROR: !!! Exception was: Error: Requiring AtSpi, version <SOMETHING>: Typelib file for namespace 'AtSpi' (<SOMETHING>) not found". Again, the journal's been flushed, so I can't remember what the number was, but hopefully you get the idea. Turns out that whatever package supplies AtSpi, I had configured it to put its stuff in /usr/lib, but never did a parallel install in /usr/lib64, which is where the 64-bit Mutter was looking for the "typelib" files. Therefore it was a simple matter of "cp /usr/lib{,64}/girepository-1.0/Atspi-2.0.typelib", and the same for one other typelib file. And then, well, viewtopic.php?f=15&t=107&p=1193316#p1193316!i

I made some attempts at getting the proprietary NVIDIA driver to work, having installed GLVND and recompiled Mesa against it. My plan of attack was to install two builds of the kernel, one with the nouveau module and one without it, and build the NVIDIA module against the latter. The GLVND library would mean that at the non-kernel level everything else would sort itself out. Unfortunately it didn't pan out. I think that's because NVIDIA's installer thought my 64-bit libraries went in /usr/lib and 32-bit in /usr/lib32. Actually lib32 was just a symlink to lib, which caused all sorts of problems. I put the symlink there ages ago when I tried (and failed) to build MinGW, so I've got rid of it now, and may try NVIDIA again next week.

For the moment, I'm running GNOME 3.22 with stable Mutter, and quite happy with it. Stable Mutter does have pointer-locking, so The Ball and Portal 2 actually work for the first time! There are a few annoyances though. Mutter on Wayland sometimes fails to take control of the keyboard properly, so Ctrl+C is interpreted as a kill signal and logs me out! I'm learning to avoid using it to copy stuff… Also Alt+F4 does something weird instead of just closing the window, I'm not sure why. Either way, when I don't really need GNOME-isms, I can pick "Sway" in GDM instead of "GNOME" and log on to my trusty old tiling WM!

The other day I finally started playing Beyond Good and Evil, thinking the pointer-locking would make it playable. For some reason though, the pointer-locking doesn't work with that game! I had noticed that "GNOME on Xorg" is also available as an option in GDM, and I realized that I did have a lot of the groundwork laid for using Xorg on this system (especially since GNOME forced me to install all that Wacom stuff!). All I needed to do was install two drivers: an input one and an output one. In Wayland such things are dealt with in a much more streamlined fashion, but still, it was a simple matter of compiling these two small libraries, and now "GNOME on Xorg" works! And so does BG&E!

So, yeah. Maybe this would've been better off as a blog post, but hopefully it's in some way entertaining. The games that I mention give some hint as to my initial motivations, but I'd still be happy to provide more background in a separate post.

[incognito]

Now that's what I call perseverance! And about NVIDIA, I don't think the installator is a good idea, it almost never works after the install, especially when coupled with Bumblebee.
I still don't understand what in the world made you compile the driver in the kernel and not as a module though you wasted a big amount of time doing so.
I'm glad that you were able to make some games work with Wine on your computer though. You lucky bastard, for some reason it doesn't work on my computer.

To give some news, I finally picked up the components of my PiP Boy when I was in France, (unfortunately some components were forgotten and I had to buy them online, all of them arrived before my departure except some wires) and.... That crap wasn't straightforward to assemble, damn.
I downloaded NOOBS from my apartment and it took two days to finish with my connection.
But of course thus ain't any Linux problem, the problem went afterwards. I first struggled to find an HDMI cable (days) and I was finally able to get a visual on a screen. My first objective was to set up my 3.5 touchscreen set up, to do so I had to install a custom kernel image provided by Adafruit, I also had to download all the necessary modules to get the extra equipment working, but that wasn't my priority.
So I probably spent two days on it, and it failed, miserably, it even ended up bricking my device, and I knew I had to start over, I know I could've compiled my kernel myself, it would've been simpler, but for some reason I just hate compiling kernels, so I decided to start over with a pure Raspbian image and the kernel shipped with it, I went to a cybercafé to download it from there and spare some time.
I installed the image on my sd card and booted it up. Only to be greeted on my beautiful little touchscreen that simply stole the HDMI signal from the TV. PiX is a good interface but... it ain't absolutely adapted to a 3.5 screen, it is a bit of a hell to work with this.
So I reconfigured my Xorg.conf file to make it boot up on the tv.
It worked.
My objective was now the configuration of my system and to install the necessary programs, raspbian is just plain empty, and doesn't even have a video player shipped with it.
I used the GUI package manager to try to install some but for some reason it just didn't worked, even after downloading and updating the package list some just didn't worked.
I digged and I found probably in a log an error saying that the download link provided was invalid. (What?!) So I switched to Curses interfaced Aptitude, which is albeit a bit strange to work with a good package manager.
Everything worked, pretty flawlessly.
So I downloaded Awesome WM (yeah!) and...
Well... How the hell was I supposed to run it ?!
Xwmconfig dude, just like on good'n old Slackware
- Yeah !
Oh wait... what tha fuck ?!
Oh shit, Debian.
Indeed, any attempt ended up logging me into the PiX LXDE interface, no awesomeness.
So I duck duck goed it up, and I found a command :
Update-Alternatives --config -X-Window-Manager (or something like that)
Okay, testing.
PIX LXDE
FUCK !
Trying and trying.
Oh ! Perhaps it is the Session manager that redirects me to PiXEL !
Switching to command line boot.
PiXEL again.

I went to the LXDE startup file and I switched the final line to launch Awesome.
Aaaand... It worked !
I booted to the Awesome pure interface that blended magnificently well on my tft screen.
So I copied the interface files that I carefully crafted with love and time on my computer to finally have it working after all tlhat polishing.
...
..
.
Nothing.
Just... pure interface.
Everything was correctly done though.
So, a little bit bitter, I just copied all the config files into the shared directory as root, only to see my Awesome session crash and deprivated of any user interface, I went to the LXDE config file to temporary bring PiX back.
And I realised that I didn't backed up my config file and that it didn't launched PiX... but pure LXDE ! Which is just unusable on a 3.5 screen and looks hideous !
I struggled to bring it back but I was unsuccessful.
Duckduckgoed and googled but nothing. Just nothing.
So I just opened my system's original image and managed to find my old config file.
It worked as a charm.
But now back on what mattered, I had to try to figure out why my interface fucked up, why it didn't launched.
I went to my X log files and I saw no errors.
So I checked my Awesome version...
That crap is the 3.4 version !!! I work with the 3.9 and won't work with anything below 3.5, the fucka.
I would've thought that a 2015 system image would at least have a newer version, that crap is more outdated than Slackware 14.1.
So I tried to compile it and for some reason it doesn't want to compile, and it brings me here, I still haven't tried again yet, but I'll figure out how.
It is a resume of what I have done, I struggled to do more things but I don't think they deserve to be here.