Fitzcarraldo's Blog

A couple of weeks after my previous post regarding the demise of my two legacy laptops, my legacy ASRock ION330HT nettop failed to boot. It seems bad luck does come in threes. In that post I described how I had connected the nettop’s eSATA port to each of the 2.5″ HDDs salvaged from my two dead laptops in order to remove the ATA Security password, repartition and reformat the HDDs, then put them in external USB HDD cases for general use.

The demise of my laptops Recently both my laptops – a ten-year-old 14″ Clevo W230SS running the stable version of Gentoo Linux, and a fifteen-year-old 15.6″ Compal NBLB2 running the testing version of Gentoo Linux – died. The Clevo laptop was my main machine. They had been heavily used in succession for work and personal tasks for more than a decade in several countries and hot climates, so I was not surprised when they finally packed up.

Stuttering audio in Linux: PulseAudio strikes again I unmasked PulseAudio 10.0 back in January 2017 and installed it in my Gentoo Stable amd64 installation, and everything worked fine… until a couple of days ago, when the audio in streaming YouTube videos started to stutter every so often. It sounded rather like a scratched LP jumping. At first I thought the problem lay with Firefox, but the stuttering audio also occurred in Chrome.

I have blogged previously about a couple of problems with using Powerline adapters in my home network: ‘Waiting for 192.168.1.254…’ (Why I could not access a home hub’s management page) Powerline adapters and IPv6 As my NETGEAR XAV1301 (200 Mbps) Powerline adapters bought in 2012 apparently do not fully support IPv6, and as my NETGEAR XAV5221 (500 Mbps) adapters bought in 2016 are no longer manufactured either, I decided to invest in some new Powerline adapters that would guarantee IPv6 support.

LXQt in Lubuntu 22.04 uses XScreenSaver to provide both the screen saver and lock screen, and XScreenSaver appears to be tightly integrated with LXQt. My family had the following configuration for the screensaver and for session locking in their individual user accounts on the family desktop computer: 1. XScreenSaver was installed by default in Lubuntu 22.04. 2.

PID file path discrepancy for the clamd service in Gentoo Linux Back in December I noticed that the OpenRC init script for clamd in Gentoo Linux reported the clamd service status as ‘crashed’, when in fact it was still running (I raised Gentoo Linux Bug Report 921088 to report this).

Upgrading the Portage Profile to 23.0 in Gentoo Linux (OpenRC) and merging /usr This week I finally had some spare time to upgrade the Gentoo Linux Portage Profile from 17.1 to 23.0 (see Gentoo Linux News item of 22 March 2024 titled ‘Profile upgrade to version 23.0 available‘) in my two Gentoo Linux installations: one Stable (amd64), the other Testing (~amd64).

Yesterday I looked through some old CDROMs with a view to disposing of them. I came across one from 2001 from a company called Focus Multimedia Limited, titled ‘4,000 fonts – A comprehensive collection of stylish and professional fonts’ for Windows 95 / 98 / Me / NT / 2000 / XP. It is still readable and contains both PostScript and TrueType font files, as well as a Windows application called BOSS Font Manager to view the fonts.

The height of the KDE Plasma Kickoff Application Launcher menu is not user-configurable, which is odd in a Desktop Environment with a reputation for being highly user-configurable.

Migrating the ebuild repository locations in my Gentoo Linux installations to the current defaults I installed Gentoo Linux on my two laptops in 2010 and 2015 respectively, long before the distribution’s developers changed the default locations of the repositories for ebuilds and packages in an installation.