InsaneJournal

Current mood:

grumpy

Weather day
This was one of those days when the weather alarm goes off every hour or so with another warning or watch. Tornado watches, severe thunderstorm warnings, flash flood warnings, and so forth. We actually shut everything down at one point because the lightning was so heavy, though we never got much rain beyond a spattering. Now they say it will snow on Sunday. I'd scoff, except that there are actual blizzard warnings out in the Dakotas and Minnesota.

Finally got a good stable graphical display on the Alpha this morning, no thanks to the software. This is the first occasion in many years that I've had to say bad things about Linux. Well, not Linux itself, which runs fine on the Alpha, but the X.org graphical interface, which serves not only Linux, but several flavors of BSD and some other operating environments. When it was XFree86 it was constantly improving. Now that it's X.org, the bugs are multiplying faster than the code. I couldn't get a decent windowing interface on the S3 Trio 64, my original choice for the Alpha because it also works with OpenVMS. There seem to be multiple introduced bugs in the S3 driver (which used to work just fine back on XFree86.) I went on EBay and got an ELSA Gloria L for about $20. That doesn't work with OpenVMS, but should work with Linux. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with the X.org version of the drivers. Same problems as the S3 Trio, even though it's a totally different driver. So I bought another cheap video card off EBay, this time a Matrox Millennium. I knew that one would work because I have one running in the other Alpha at the library. And it does work.

Unfortunately, while trying to debug the S3 driver, I installed beta versions of several system elements at the request of the software support team. They didn't fix the S3 problems, and it seemed like too much trouble to remove them, so I left them in place. That was a bad mistake. Something in the X.org system turned around and crashed today, hard. It trashed some undetermined number of files on the hard disk on its way down. I'll probably end up having to reinstall everything to get a stable system back out of it. That wouldn't be too big an issue, since there's next to no actual data on there right now, except running a network install over a dialup line takes many hours. Like about 24 to 30 of them.

Maybe it's time to try Gentoo...