Category archives: Tuxedo

So I guess it's necessary that I write this up, as my previous reviews of this laptop were relatively positive, despite the PITA-ish ness of using it with Linux and the coil-whine of the power supply, and the latest issue makes it a "stay the hell away" recommendation.

Background:

A few months ago ...

It's half-way through 2016 and to get Tensor Flow installed on Ubuntu 16.04 one has to register for an nVidia developer's program? Here's a hint, current LTS for Ubuntu installing a widely-used AI library should require (in total):

apt-get install tensorflow tensorflow-gpu

Seriously, why make installing a widely used library a PITA? It's only useful ...

So yesterday I tried connecting an external monitor to my nVidia proprietary driver KDE laptop. It went meh, as the external display is so much lower resolution (and so much larger) than the configurations on the laptop make the monitor look like a VGA blown up to ridiculous proportions. Oh well, unplugged the monitor this ...

There's a rather annoying bug in the synaptics driver on Linux on the Dell XPS 15 9550. Basically, if you are using one finger to move around and another to click the "button" areas at the bottom of the screen, instead of taking that second finger as "click here", it sometimes interprets the second finger ...

Just a reminder, as of tomorrow Let's Encrypt should be in public Beta (i.e. *every* public-facing server you create from tomorrow on should have SSL-by-default).

So this morning every single VirtualBox VM refuses to load. Ever-so-helpful "there was an error" messages. I'm assuming I'm looking at a driver, libc, or similar failure from the dist-upgrade of the host this morning. Yay. This is *not* what I needed to work on this morning.

[Update] a workstation/server reboot (Egads! this is Linux, ...

So I pulled the upgrade switch on the (Dell Inspiron) laptop on Friday. It trundled for almost the whole day doing the upgrade, then rebooted to a black-and-totally-unresponsive screen, with no way to switch to virtual consoles... I did a hard-reboot, booted to recovery console and reinstalled the fglrx (proprietary AMD) drivers, then rebooted... and ...

We happened to win a Kindle Fire HDX tablet at an event. Since we've been talking about getting the kids a tablet for a while I thought "yay, sorted"... until they actually tried it.

There are no apps for the thing. Or, rather, the apps the kids actually use, YouTube, various games, Google Maps, etc, ...

So when I started testing the soon-to-be-released KDE Plasma 5.x releases they were... less-than-usable on fglrx (and would fairly frequently fail to come back from suspend/resume), so I had to switch the laptop over to Intel graphics. However, since I need to be able to run OpenCL and OpenGL/GPGPU stuff on the laptop I switched ...

So I've been wrapping a troublesome service in a Docker container today. This service has all sorts of assumptions where it "runs the show" on the server, all of those assumptions being wrong. So far it's been going pretty well. I'd already done most of the isolation work previously when I'd integrated it directly into ...