Laptop, round two; Intelligent criticism

It seems that Mandriva 2006.0 will indeed install on a Durabook R15D, and the magic word is “noauto”, as in, hit F1 then type “linux noauto «Enter»”. The double-take part of this is that noauto is not supposed to actually change anything that the installer does, except to make it stop and ask about device drivers for everything instead of auto-detecting them. It auto-detects them anyway, but this time they work. D’oh?

However, the installer then botches the detection of the video card (it’s an Intel 915) and sound (i810), and once the installation is complete, it doesn’t boot. Adding the parameters from the install/rescue boot don’t make it go, either.

It seems that the kernel used for installation and rescue is not as similar to the identically-versioned running kernel as it ought to be. Since there doesn’t appear to be a binary RPM for the installer kernel, I’m setting about making one. I’m reasonably sure that the laptop hardware is stable, since rebuilding the kernel RPMs from the .src.rpm involves (so far) six kernel rebuilds from scratch without a hiccup.

I also stumbled across this intelligent commentary in the news, which encapsulates my own feelings on the ID-in-court thing fairly well.

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new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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