Somehow the last few weeks seem to have been hectic; there has always been something to do.
Finally things are over, though. No doctor's visits for a few weeks, cat gradually
settling in. And a mound of email to work through.
No Mona to be seen today. Petra Gietz
was here, and of course she wanted to see her, but she remained behind the bassoon cabinet
all day. It wasn't until the evening that she finally came out. Things seem to be getting
better, though. I held her while Yvonne took the dogs past
us, and though she tried to escape, it wasn't too hard, and I held her until the dogs were
gone again. Then I let her go, and she didn't disappear immediately. So things do seem to
be improving.
How is that going to work? If the driver is built into the kernel, you can't load another
driver. And of course that is what happened:
=== root@hydra (/dev/pts/5) ~ 4 -> kldload if_re.ko kldload: can't load if_re.ko: module already loaded or in kernel
I had thought that it was a separate driver. While searching, found this page, which, for the latest
update, states “Note: the driver is still unstable (crash or hang) on some cards/machines”.
Other bugs fixed in the last year are also less than encouraging: “fix kernel panic when
generating MAC address", “fix panic when kldloaded outside of loader”.
Not quite what I want in a production machine. And to even attempt to load the module, I
will have to reboot, with all the untidy ends that that entails. Even then, it's not clear
that the module will load; maybe I'll need to build a kernel without the re driver.
So for the time being I'll leave things as they are.
Can I find other ways to avoid the hangs I had over the weekend? For reasons I don't
understand, despise.lemis.com tries to access the eureka:/dump file system
when I run DxO PhotoLab. What do I
need /dump for? For backups, in principle. But this is a VM, and it's so
much easier to back it up (and restore it if necessary) from behind the scenes rather than
running a Microsoft backup program. So umount it, or whatever Microsoft calls it.
What does Microsoft call it? No idea. I went through likely searches and drew a
blank. Then played around with the file manager or whatever it's called, the one that with
the right clicks will display a graphical representation of file systems and “folders”. Right click. Disconnect! That's the
word. But even then, I couldn't find any hits from Microsoft on windows
disconnect share.
Will that be enough? It will certainly save time waiting for the drive to spin up. Clearly
I should move the /Photos file system to hydra. But that will require
considerable restructuring, and in principle I want a 12 TB or more SSD, which is not yet practicable. So maybe I
should consider some symlink mess.
Where's Vinum when
you need it? Dead and gone, unfortunately. Yes, I could almost certainly do something
similar with ZFS, but that requires
more learning than I'm prepared to do.
Finally got round to writing up my monthly garden flower page for this month. The big difference was removing the
Acacia melanoxylon (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its
neighbour):
How do I align them? I have scripts that align photos taken on a single day, but these are
a week apart. And to add to the annoyance, my scripts really assume that the build
directory and the directory for the day's files are on the same file system, and here they
are not, so I need to use symlinks. OK, after setting up for one day, I had:
That looks right, and it worked. But what went wrong with the symlinks?
FOOL! Unlike ln, ln -s copies names, not inode numbers. In
this case, instead of linking to ~/Photos/20240420/C/laundry-door-0.tiff (for
example), it linked to laundry-door-0.tiff (in the destination directory). Normally
this would have failed, but I already had files named laundry-door-0.tiff
to laundry-door-5.tiff (but not laundry-door-6.tiff) in the destination
directory, so I just created a symlink to the files already in that directory. Normally
they would all have failed.
They specify to soak in hot water for 5 to 8 minutes, but I've been cooking them for 2
minutes, like other such noodles. Too long, I think. Today I cooked for 1½ minutes, and
maybe that's also too long. More experimentation needed.
It's taking its time, but gradually Mona is becoming less timid. She comes out in the evening, when the other animals aren't there,
and gradually she's coming to terms with Bruno, who spent a lot of time following her at a distance:
One of the issues with hydra is that the X configuration is a mess. Part of that is things like font size, and it's a good thing that
I postponed until after my cataract operations: I think I can now choose a significantly smaller text size.
Even the issue with the window decorations is no longer so important, though it's still on
the small size.
The real question is the window
manager. I was quite happy with fvwm2, but X no longer is. And all the instructions say that fvwm3 is
a drop-in replacement, but that's not even close. It makes a complete mess with my
configuration files, but it's too polite to complain.
OK, yes, there are indications that it only accepts one kind of colour definition,
“colorsets”, but so far I haven't found any clear indication of how to convert them. And
then this page goes
on to discuss monitor layout and definitions. I have always had one window manager per
monitor, but it's not even clear whether fvwm3 supports this configuration.
All would be less of a problem if it would at least complain if it finds something that it
doesn't like. But so far it has been completely quiet, and there's no explanation as to why
it doesn't include my terminal definition files.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
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