December 2018 - WLUG - wlug.mailman3.com

desktop (wife=moved->linux Mint) MB/sata/grub fun

by Doug Mildram

Warning: there's a couple "fun" ( my definition for "new to me") errors/areas in this LONG email. Months ago i managed to move wife/maureen's desktop environment to Mint(ubuntu underneath). Usage: firefox,gmail (almost nothing else of note. This took some persuading, but desktops are such a fallback these days......another topic for another day) DESKTOP: 10?yr-old Gigabyte motherboard with sata2 ... 4 ports. I only use 1 sata port. I "gave" it a $90/bestbuy 256g SSD Samsung months ago for /dev/sda which ran well+fast of course, turns out the SSD is actually still fine internally. A FEW WEEKS AGO, the "hint" symptom (1 of 2 in this long story) for disk woes was.... (well, it started crashing occasionally, then) ON BOOT, it would sometimes STOP at this prompt initramfs> and with good eyes as the boot-attempt screen(s) would fly by and return to above prompt, I discovered I could fix it with ( actually i did not use the "-y" prompt, but it's the same fix either way) initramfs> fsck -y /dev/sda1 Which would fix a few things, nothing scary for an ex-unix-sysadmin, and initramfs> exit ######## would allow it to boot and be OK for days or so. I taped THAT magic (fsck...) onto a paper mini-sign on the PC for another rainy day. TODAY, the crash was followed by not booting (random results, kernel panics or bios/grub waiting). Worse (not that we care!) near the end of this story, the Patriots gave up cool kickoff return with a lead and 0:04 left. But timing-wise, I'm glad I had a few hours in the living room to debug all this. So I brought the SSD to my other living room desktop (not booting FROM it...) checked SSD with sudo smartcl -a /dev/sda #### AND ITS FINE. I moved the SSD "back" to wife's PC on another SATA port. It's fine! (motherboard deteriorating i guess....but might last another decade). I did run into.... ("created" by moving the disk i assume) .... a boot/warning error NEW TO ME: On initial boot a WARNING ERROR on the early/black screen (similar to where initramfs> shows up..just before that i think) "warning: environment block too small" was actually ignorable (after a few secs, boot marched on to kernel/logo). But I found "it's a thing" and the error appears solvable with first google hit suggesting linux user# sudo rm /boot/grub/grubenv # or "mv" it somewhere.old; 1024 byte file. ...............# sudo grub-editenv /boot/grub/grubenv create and reboot. Seems good now except (new i think; probably from the sata port move?) there's a ONE MINUTE wait on the initial boot with the Mint logo flashing. Final things-to-inspect: (no need to "fix" /etc/fstab which of course does find the disk parts ( just / and swap) by UUID and /var/log/syslog ( I have exported it all, i think the disk errors stopped. ) =========================WRAPUP Haven't solved this learn-all mission yet, but...hope to make it to WLUG THURS EVE and i just thought of a topic. Trick is knowing where to start such a story/tutorial; I'd try to skip over BIOS and sata/disk/etc basics, the fuzzy parts for me involve "initramfs" ... grub ..... and maybe that's it for me. Desired talk/take-home: linux BOOT steps you don't want to know. -doug

Dec. 10, 2018

December Meeting Reminder!

by Tim Keller

Hey Gang, We've got a meeting coming up next week! Date: Dec 13, 2018 @ 7PM. Location: WPI Campus Center (Mid Century Room 331) Topic: To Be Decided! If there's something you'd like to talk about drop me a line! Otherwise As usual, refreshments and snacks will be provided and we'll head off for dinner afterwards. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

Dec. 6, 2018

OpenGameArt Movie Video Game

by Dennis Payne

Normally I do National Novel Writing Month in November. This year I decided to try the Indie Game Making Contest 2018. I spent the month working in my free time on a new computer game. I had thought of this game a while ago (including doing a novelization of it for NaNoWriMo last year). The idea was to use lots of art from OpenGameArt.org. Since the styles of the artwork can be drastically different, that was integrated into the story. The villain is in the Liberated Pixel Cup style. (It was a contest opengameart.org did to create lot of artwork which could be used together.) He would be trying to wipe out all the other art styles. (It's a crazy mashup like the Lego Movie.) The game didn't get to the level of completion I had hoped. I posted a Postmortem on the project: http://identicalsoftware.com/games/opengameartmovie You download the Windows version of the game from: https://dulsi.itch.io/opengameart-movie-video-game Unfortunately there isn't a log of content in the game as much of the work was building the game engine. (Why isn't there a Linux download? I was rushing to post it before the contest end and didn't get around to posting a Linux build. We aren't allowed to put up new downloads while the judging is being done.) -- Dennis Payne <dulsi(a)identicalsoftware.com>

Dec. 4, 2018