Musing, Tinkering, Open Source

So... I decided to try this Windows7 thing everyone's been rambling about (I miss playing World of Warcraft every now and then (and cba to install it on linux and fix the installation every week when a new patch comes out), I admit my shame - seeing as I don't watch TV ever, I think I'm allowed this one vice... well, that and smoking... and being a vegetarian... and being psychologically unable to wear matching socks, and... (three hours later)... and my excessive use of parentheses... and never being able to finish a thought when writing... so yeah, vices galore, oh... and sometimes when I see a loose brick in the sidewalk, I... (trails off in uninteresting rambles...) ).

Anyway! (Do yourselves a favour and skip here after reading the first line or so of the above paragraph, seriously)

So, I have a Dell Studio XPS 16" laptop that has been running Kubuntu ever since I got it.
It has a HD of 320GB which I hardly use, seeing as all my important shite's on my server computer (which has 1.25TB of storage). So I decided to partition the thing, giving 100GB for a Win7 partition.

The process I was going to follow was:
1. Boot the computer with the GParted boot disc, shrink the ext3 partition, and create an NTFS one.
2. Boot back to Kubuntu to make sure it's still working.
3. Install Windoze7.
4. Restore Grub through the Kubuntu Live CD (Windows has a tendency of being rather greedy and erasing whatever's in the MBR, placing its own bootloader instead) and configure it to dual-boot Kubuntu and Windows.
5. Drink coffee.

So! I reached point number two when all hell broke loose.

I booted into Kubuntu and received the KDE login screen. I entered my username and password, received some flickering in the screen, and then came back to the KDE login screen.
I tried entering the wrong password just to check if it were an authentication thing and KDE indeed told me I had the wrong password. Meaning it only loops on a successful password.
So - I started debugging it.
Logged in through console (that was fine, accepted my password with no issue).
Tried to start KDE manually with "startx" and then received a bunch of xorg.conf errors about X being unable to recognize my ATI (fglrx) driver. (for obvious reasons I couldn't really copy-and-paste the errors here for posterity, my apologies).
So, one thing lead to another and I "aticonfig --initial"ed to rewrite the xorg.conf file. <======= <Remember this critical stage and look at the page title again>
This didn't work, I rebooted and received the exact same behaviour.
This is where I skipped to step 5 and went to stretch my legs a little.
When I came back, some more tinkering showed me that the reason KDE couldn't really find any drivers or anything is that I had (very wisely) left less than 1GB of space in the ext3 partition when doing the partition scheme with GParted. It didn't really have anything to work with - couldn't even use the swap partition.
So I deleted some stuff and rebooted. The login loop to KDE was still there. However, now through the console I was able to "startx". But (remember that driver reconfiguring thing...?) KDE couldn't find any graphic card through the driver.
So I thought to myself "Oh well, probably because I recreated the xorg.conf file for no reason whatsoever, deleting all the custom configurations I've had there to make my card work when first installing the computer. No matter, there's no way in hell I can remember them now, but "aticonfig --initial" automatically backups the old file, I'll just replace it with the new one. No harm done."
Except I soon discovered that "aticonfig --initial" couldn't backup the file, because that would require a properly working swap partition (or at least a minimal amount of HD space) which I did not have. So... no backup. Wonderful.
I spent the next few hours trying to reinstall fglrx. Then trying to remove it and install the Radeon open source driver... no dice. I honestly don't know what the hell is up with it.
Went to sleep rather frustrated. Will keep hacking at it tonight. We'll see what happens.

I just found out (month late, I know) that the new linux kernel FINALLY includes 3D support for my graphics driver.
Maybe I'll soon get a chance to actually gauge the full performance of my laptop for the first time.
I can't be arsed to compile it on my own, because out of previous experience, a custom kernel tends to wreck havoc through Kubuntu update - and I can't be arsed to make maintaining my home PC a full time job. So I just prefer to let the Kubuntu update do its thing every few months (I know I've complained about this very updater in a previous post - I suppose laziness comes before forethought and practicality).
A little bit of reading showed that the new Kubuntu 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx (I seriously can't wait for when they rollback through the alphabet and reach the letter F...) will include this new Kernel. Well, just four more months to wait.

In other news - I finally tackled bug-2075 completely. It was one of those "I keep thinking I'm done, but then discover this weird scenario which forces me to rewrite everything". Like bug-2169, this one also required quite a bit of code-rewriting.
I haven't submitted a patch yet because I need to clean up the code (quite some rewriting was done, as I said)... Will get 'round to it tonight, I hope.
New stuff this does:
* Changing the email you get when you send a copy to yourself to "You sent [[username]] a message" (it used to be "[[your username]] sent [[your username]] a message").
* Changed the corresponding email body text to link to the profile, journal, etc. of the person you sent the message *to*.
* Changed the subject of the copy message itself in your DW mailbox to include a preceding "Copy of: " - just to make things more clear.
* Added limited support to sending a copy of a message you sent to multiple recipients... I wanted to add full support (stuff like you getting an email saying "You sent X, Y and Z a message on Dreamwidth", but because of the way compose.bml is written, it would have required considerable rewriting... and since it was just a "nice to have" extra thing and not mentioned in the bug requirements, I wrote that off as something to do at another time.

I've got another minor bug assigned to me. Hope to solve that rather quickly, and then will start working on the HTTPS browsing mode feature.

Just a very quick rant, might expand on it later if I have time:

Yes, it's true - you are always asked to confirm a system update.
Yes, it's true - you can browse all the packages that are being updated, changed and can easily find out what changes are going to be done exactly.
Yes, it's true - most of these updates have release notes alerting for specific issues that the updates might cause.

But for fuck's sake - when I update I usually have 30+ updates (especially in this past month or two since Kubuntu 9.10 came out), and I'm sorry, but I just cba to start going over each and every one of them to see how my custom changes might be affected.
And seeing as I come from the "if stuff asks to be updated, it's probably important and should be updated right away" mentality, I rather often find myself with essential little services simply not working.

So when KpackageKit updates paths in my custom Bind9 files (God knows why), I find myself spending almost an hour finding out exactly what happened and why I can't access my Apache server the day after. An hour I really wanted to spend actually fixing bugs. Bleh.

Might just have to stop automatically confirming updates and just leave them for a specific time during the week in which I actually go over everything they're doing, because this is the third time in the past month this has happened (you'd think I'd learn to narrow it down quicker by now, eh? Or at least learn that whenever this happens, I should drink a cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette, calm down and THEN start finding out why I can't test the code I've just written... angry/frustrated system-work is sloppy system work).