dgoodwin's blog

I made a few mistakes this week when a salesman from Protection Plus Security (a company name that seems too common for me to identify a link) showed up on my doorstep.

When told they contract and install security systems for ADT and were running a promotion for cheaper installation in return for logo advertising, despite having been thinking about installing one, I should not have assumed it would be a convenient time to get the information.

When presented with the rather shocking costs of equipment I'd be saving as a result of this "promotion", I should have inquired exactly what the "normal" installation fees are. (according to ADT's website the normal price is virtually indistinguishable from what I was presented with)

When (following a reasonably decent discussion of the systems specifics) I mentioned I was interested but wouldn't be making a decision on the spot and was told in vague terms that he was only in the area that night after which they wouldn't be able to offer me said "promotion", I should have immediately become suspicious.

When told that I could sign the contract now and then cancel within 10 days if I change my mind, I should have become more suspicious.

When told that I could not be given a "blank" copy of the rather lengthy contract to review while considering, I should have inquired why an unsigned contract is dangerous to them, or if there's just something in there they don't want customers to uncover.

When told that the contract wouldn't make sense to me anyhow as I'm not legally trained, I should have told him to get the $*%^ out of my house.

When told that by not being willing to sign I was telling him I'm not ready for a security system (and implicitly, just wasted his valuable time), I should have pointed out that perhaps I'm just not ready to sign a long 3 year contract I won't be able to understand on the spot for a guy who spontaneously showed up on my doorstep 20 minutes ago and refuses any possibility of letting me consider the prospect beyond the evening.

During this I did manage to do two things right, refuse to give him the name of two family or friends who might be interested in a security system in exchange for free fire detection (which magically was still included after I refused), and ultimately get this assclown out of the house with nothing but my first name.

I don't know how much of the blame for this rubbish is actually on ADT vs this lame local contracting company, but guilt by association, I won't be buying ADT.

And so begin the lessons in home ownership, NO SOLICITING.

As usual I got anxious and upgraded to Fedora 9 (beta) a couple weeks ago. This normally causes a few headaches, almost always involving the nvidia binary graphics drivers. (as the kernels seem to come too fast for the Livna repositories to keep up, although there appears to be some neat things in the works for auto-compiling kernel modules in F9) However I should have done some reading beforehand this time around because as it turns out Fedora 9 is currently using a pre-release of xorg 1.5 with some incompatible changes, and nvidia doesn't release drivers for un-released versions of xorg. From everything I've read it appears it just won't work unless you're willing to downgrade xorg and everything that comes with it.

The nv driver looks like rubbish with my hardware and won't get me up to the 1600x1200 resolution I'm used to so I did some experimenting with the nouveau. With a slight xorg.conf tweak I was able to get my full resolution but no 3d effects. Not a huge problem as I don't even use them normally, but I noticed a pretty brutal performance bug creeping up after a few hours of heavy X use. (6 second workspace changes, huge cpu spikes, etc) Filed a bug on the problem and got some good debugging suggestions, one of which actually clears the problem up (for awhile) without forcing you to restart X. (switching VT's and back)

Regardless I was missing that binary driver's performance and decided to install the Ubuntu Hardy Heron beta on my spare partition to see what they've been up too. I was a pretty happy Ubuntu user before getting hired at Red Hat almost a year and a half ago, but I switched to Fedora to get a feel for RPM based systems once the job began to look promising. Having run Debian/Ubuntu for about 8 years I was a bit of a reluctant convert and griped about the usual yum/rpm things, but quite simply I have been anything but lacking on my Fedora desktop this past year.

So having spent a good deal of time in Ubuntu the past few weeks, the thing I'm most surprised by is how little I have to say about it. Yes the install was easy and yes I had support for the binary nvidia driver and proprietary audio/video formats with very nice and informative prompts, but we're seriously talking about behavior you can replicate with Fedora without even hitting the command line in about 5 minutes. It seems to boot up a little quicker but regular desktop performance with both distros is just awesome. apt still rocks but I've come to realize that yum does a fine job, and slightly slower software installs really don't phase me in the least. Synaptic was always nice in Debian but I believe Fedora 9 has introduced PackageKit as the default graphical package manager and I really quite like this, both for what it is now and what I expect it will be. (very vibrant project) Ubuntu continues to look pretty good although largely the same, I'd give the clear edge for appearance to Fedora but everything's themed so in the end who really cares. The Ubuntu beta was drastically more crash happy on x86_64 than F9 was but I can't really blame either side for this in the beta stage.

That's really all that came to mind. Mostly the experiment just taught me that technically speaking, I can do everything I want to *very* easily with both distros, but I've gradually become more comfortable with Fedora. Over the last year I've gotten a glimpse into the people, infrastructure, and company that makes Fedora tick and I like what I see. I enjoyed this Fedora is the New Ubuntu post today and it sums things up pretty good. Things are happening in Fedora, big things that appear there first and elsewhere much later. Even with such aggressive development and integration, it's still all delivered on a platform that's remarkably stable and user friendly. Granted Canonical has nowhere near the resources Red Hat does to throw back into community contributions, and perhaps their contribution is just bringing Linux to so many people in such a well polished package. Red Hat however does have those resources, and they're putting them to good use. I have to agree that while Ubuntu is an excellent distribution, there is something to be said for Fedora's fostering a community of contributors rather than consumers.

Maybe it's Fedora and maybe it's just the influence of the people I work with, but it's the first distribution I felt inclined to get involved with and it wasn't hard to do. I always assumed that if I stopped working for Red Hat I'd be a Ubuntu user again within a week. I no longer think that's the case.

Spent this weekend finishing off the unpacking and cleaning and finally got around to taking some photos of the new place.

The move was, a little tiring to say the least. We took ownership on Wednesday and then spent Thursday and Friday finishing off the packing and getting in as much cleaning as we could. Friday night we moved a load of huge awkward stuff in 13 cm of wet snow and had some fun with a king mattress that just wouldn't fit up the stairs. (until we realized it could be bent) Saturday was actually quite beautiful after the snow and we had a pile of friends and family show up to help out with the big move that was all over in about three hours. All said the big move day was actually the easiest of the three. Sunday it was back to the old place to clean which we weren't nearly as well prepared for as we were for the moving. 7 hours, one brutal inspection, and one flat tire later, we were out and done with almost all of our damage deposit. Would have been a joyous moment were it not for the flat tire on the drive back.

Setting in great and loving the new place. Lots of space, sunshine, walking trails on all sides, a fireplace, and most of all quiet. We've been living right on top of traffic for almost 10 years, now we can't tell a difference if the windows are opened or closed.

Today marks the long awaited closing date for our townhouse, we should have the keys in our possession within an hour and will be making a micro-move over to the new place tonight and probably staying there from here on out. Should have phone and internet hooked up tomorrow so we may be around online intermittently via laptop/n800. Office and main computer won't be setup until early next week so mostly MIA until then.

Reachable by cell, hopefully email, and hopefully phone within a day or two. See most of you next week and our beloved moving volunteers on Saturday. Cheers!

Had a remarkably smooth live yum upgrade to Fedora 9 yesterday but have run into just one problem I'd like to get solved to go about my daily computing that's giving me a bit of trouble. I have Dell 2005fp and an nVidia GeForce 6200 graphics card that was probably a little too cheap when I bought it to be of high quality. In general I have always run the proprietary nvidia xorg drivers which gave me the full 1600x1200 resolution my hardware was capable of. However in Fedora 9 from what I've been able to gather, we're using an in-development version of xorg which nVidia doesn't yet support, and from my experince using the livna nvidia packages it looks like there's something fundamentally wrong. I've done some Googling and the only workable solution I've found so far is downgrading xorg, which sounds like a rats nest I'd like to avoid.

Frankly all I really need is that full resolution, 3d can wait, but using nv or nouveau drivers I can't seem to get my full 1600x1200. (nor have I ever had this working with these drivers) By default I have a bare bones xorg.conf which just magically works with the nvidia driver. I've been trying to tweak it for nv and nouveau by specifying modelines and refresh rates explicitly but can't seem to find anything that takes effect. The most suspicious line in the log is:

(II) NOUVEAU(0): Not using mode "1600x1200" (exceeds panel dimensions)

Same thing appears for the nv driver. It starts up fine, but only at 12080x1024.

Anyone out there fought with getting these drivers to deliver the full resolution their hardware is capable of?

UPDATE: Opened this ticket and had a very quick response, all that was needed was Option "Randr12" in the Device section and I immediately had my 1600x1200. Such fast help, kudos to Maarten Maathuis.

xorg.conf (now working!!!)


# Xorg configuration created by livna-config-display

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "single head configuration"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
EndSection

Section "Files"
ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AIGLX" "on"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"

#ModeLine "1600x1200" 130.25 1600 1648 1680 1760 1200 1203 1207 1235
#Modeline "1600x1200" 160.00 1600 1664 1856 2160 1200 1201 1204 1250 +hsync +vsync
#Modeline "1600x1200" 162.00 1600 1624 1976 2160 1200 1201 1204 1250 +HSync +VSync
Identifier "Dell 2001FP"
VendorName "AMT"
ModelName "PL201M"
DisplaySize 408 306
HorizSync 31.0 - 80.0
VertRefresh 56.0 - 76.0
ModeLine "1600x1200" 162.0 1600 1664 1856 2160 1200 1201 1204 1250
Option "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nouveau"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "Randr12"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Dell 2001FP"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

I rewrote most of the GTK table code earlier in the week (have I mentioned how much I love Glade 3?) to now look *almost* like something that could actually resemble a poker table. Should now seat 10 players instead of the previous 4. Dozens of general gameplay commits to keep things running smooth, it's actually quite playable at the moment, we ran through several hands in a network game a couple nights ago and it seemed to be working fine, although it's a little disorienting when you're used to the sounds in actual online poker clients.

Between bowes and Kenny we've got a curses UI moving along, as well as a replacement hand evaluator that's not quite finished but when it is, will relieve the dependency we have on the non-Python pokereval code. Another friend is reportedly hacking on support for various graphical cards which will be an awesome addition.

"sudo python setup.py install" should now get you an installed and playable version of rounder-server, rounder, and rounder-txt (not yet completed).

Account creation is stalled due to some missing functionality in Twisted for anonymous logins when using perspective broker. Fix is coming out in Twisted 8, not yet in Fedora so I'm waiting for that to appear before I apply the patch to start us down the path. Once it's in logins will be anonymous, your avatar received then will only allow you to do certain things, among them create yourself an account, and of course login. This and chat (which will be super easy) are the only two things on my mind grapes that need to be done for a 0.0.1.

More info available on the project page for those interested.