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desktop (wife=moved->linux Mint) MB/sata/grub fun
by Doug Mildram Dec. 12, 2018

Dec. 12, 2018

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

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Topic of Thursday meeting
by Keith Wright Dec. 10, 2018

Dec. 10, 2018

> From: "Anderson, Charles R" <cra(a)wpi.edu> > Subject: [WLUG] WLUG meeting this week > > We have a WLUG meeting scheduled for this Thursday at 7pm in the WPI > Campus Center, Mid-Century Room (the location we use most often). > > Subject: [WLUG] Re: December Meeting Reminder! > From: Chuck Anderson via WLUG <wlug(a)lists.wlug.org> > > Maybe we could talk about DMARC, DKIM, and SPF! ****pssst! Frank!*** Why does one message say From: cra(a)wpi.edu, and the other From: wlug(a)lists.wlug.org? (Nervermind, CRA explained that.) I don't want to try to prevent anyone from talking about anything, but I don't have much to say about that. I would have wrote you a letter, but I couldn't spell PHLTT!! If Frank does not have a presentation, I could commit by Thursday to make some slides and bring a laptop. I tested slide-showing a few months ago with the WPI cable in the Mid-century Room and it worked. Here's the catch: My usual ride is unavailable that day. I don't drive and I have not been walking well. I used to walk to WLUG; I fell on the hill. No problem; I got up and went on; it happens. I don't want to be carrying heavy and fragile equipment. I tried to go for a walk this morning, but fell and skinned my knee at the end of my own driveway. If someone could commit to pick me up at my house about 1/2 hour before the meeting I would make sure I was ready enough to fake it. I live about a mile from WPI. Send me mail. I will show you some of what I have been doing, and how I do it. The title of my talk: Love Programs work better than Love Poems Computatational Metaphysics Why and how to write soutce code that can be read Or something else if I thnk of it. Someone said recently that one of the best talks ever was Doug Waud showing TeX printing stuff nobody understood. I thought: "I could do that". I am not a pharmacist, so I will dazzle you with Scheme programs and Algebraic Geometry run through LaTeX. All in living black and white (or glowing green). -- Keith

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WLUG mailing list
by Keith Wright Dec. 10, 2018

Dec. 10, 2018

> From: "Anderson, Charles R" <cra(a)wpi.edu> > To: "wlug(a)lists.wlug.org" <wlug(a)lists.wlug.org> > Subject: [WLUG] WLUG meeting this week > > I haven't seen any messages to the list since November 8, > so I'm sending this message to see if the mailing list still works. > We have a WLUG meeting scheduled for this Thursday at 7pm in the WPI > Campus Center, Mid-Century Room (the location we use most often). There might be something wrong, I saw: > From: "thinkbrown(a)gmail.com" <thinkbrown(a)gmail.com> > Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2018 18:27:19 -0500 > To: wlug(a)lists.wlug.org > Subject: [WLUG] Frantic last minute room change > Sorry for the last minute notice > Logan (pretending to be Tim) I missed that meeting, and I think the one before that, due to scheduling conflicts. You might find these two in the tl/dr filrer: > From: Dennis Payne <dulsi(a)identicalsoftware.com> > Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2018 07:56:41 -0500 > Subject: [WLUG] OpenGameArt Movie Video Game > I spent the month working in my free time on a new computer game. > > From: Doug Mildram <dmildram(a)gmail.com> > Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2018 23:07:05 -0500 > To: wlug(a)lists.wlug.org > Subject: [WLUG] desktop (wife=moved->linux Mint) MB/sata/grub fun > > Warning: there's a couple "fun" ( my definition for "new to me") > errors/areas in this LONG email. If you want 140 character dim witticisms, you know where to look. This not that. The message that demands attention is this: > From: Tim Keller <turbofx(a)gmail.com> > Subject: [WLUG] December Meeting Reminder! > > 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 > C.R.A continues: > From: "Anderson, Charles R" <cra(a)wpi.edu> > Subject: [WLUG] WLUG meeting this week > > We have a WLUG meeting scheduled for this Thursday at 7pm in the WPI > Campus Center, Mid-Century Room (the location we use most often). Yes. If you did not see Tim's announcement of the same, then something is wrong. Which leads me to my proposal, which I will put in another message so that it is not lost at the bottom. -- Keith PS: While I was writing this, two new messages came to me from wlug, one appears to be a copy of Doug Mildram's message dated 2018-12-09 the other a reply to that.

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mailing list issues
by Anderson, Charles R Dec. 10, 2018

Dec. 10, 2018

Some people (including myself) have not been receiving emails sent to the list. I'm guessing that DMARC may be blocking messages from senders' domains that have DMARC set up, so I made a MailMan change to enable DMARC Mitigations. This works by replacing your "From: you(a)wherever.com" with "From: Your Full Name via WLUG <wlug(a)lists.wlug.org>". Your original From: appears in the Reply-To: header. I'm also sending this message to test delivery to a few domains like yahoo.com and gmail.com.

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December Meeting Reminder!
by Tim Keller Dec. 10, 2018

Dec. 10, 2018

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".

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desktop (linux Mint/ubuntu) Motherboard/sata/grub fun
by Doug Mildram Dec. 10, 2018

Dec. 10, 2018

Warning: there's a couple "fun" ( aka "new to me") things in this LONG email. SUMMARY 2-lines-below: 1) on reboot, an initramfs prompt, errors only seen briefly as boot screen overwrites it. Needed fsck. 2) later when things got worse, my solution followed by a different error message re: "environment block too small". the LONG story: 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/sataII ... 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.... ( 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 worked every time (a few times), nothing scary for an ex-unix-sysadmin, followed by 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). 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 exportedthe old history to study, 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 (this) 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

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WLUG meeting this week
by Anderson, Charles R Dec. 10, 2018

Dec. 10, 2018

I haven't seen any messages to the list since November 8, so I'm sending this message to see if the mailing list still works. We have a WLUG meeting scheduled for this Thursday at 7pm in the WPI Campus Center, Mid-Century Room (the location we use most often).

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OpenGameArt Movie Video Game
by Dennis Payne Dec. 4, 2018

Dec. 4, 2018

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>

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Frantic last minute room change
by thinkbrown＠gmail.com Nov. 8, 2018

Nov. 8, 2018

Hey WLUG! Frantic last minute change of room. Due to the relative inaccessibility of Stratton after 5PM, we moved to Campus Center room 128 (the Taylor Room). This is on the first floor (down the stairs through the main entrance). Sorry for the last minute notice Logan (pretending to be Tim)

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Reminder! WLUG Meeting NEXT week! Nov. 8th, 2018! NOTE: LOCATION CHANGE!
by Tim Keller Nov. 2, 2018

Nov. 2, 2018

Hey Gang! We've got a meeting next week! Date and Time: Nov. 8th, 2018 @ 7pm Location: *Stratton Hall Room 309* Topic: GNURadio / Software Defined Radio / GQRX Presenter: Ian Gelman Here's what Ian had to say about his presentation... I'd like to throw my hat in the ring and give an overview+demo of GNURadio, a FOSS package for graphically developing DSP applications and interfacing with Software-Defined Radios (SDR). I spent last summer at MITRE using this software heavily, and I'm also using it for my MQP work. For the demo, I'd like to bring down some hardware from my lab ( https://www.ettus.com/product/details/UN210-KIT) as well as the $20 RTL-SDR dongle ( http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-mini-rtl2832-r820t.html) to show reception of broadcast FM, ADS-B telemetry from airplanes, as well as some real time views of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and streaming drone footage from a DJI Phantom 3 Pro. Here's the outline: What's SDR? Why should we care? Why do I care? Who uses GNURadio? GNURadio fundamentals Introducing the workflow/flowgraph interface Cloning/Building/Installing (this won't be specific, just mentioning the GitHub repo and where the quickstart guide is) How to contribute (also GR-hackfest!) GNURadio as a software development framework Ex: GQRX (http://gqrx.dk) For the demo, I'll show off some stuff I've made with GNURadio, as well as GQRX to interface with the RTL-SDR. I'm pretty confident that I can cram it inside of 2 hours, because I'll be basically recycling the slides I made for my MITRE presentation, minus the branding and project-specific content. As usual, drinks and snacks will be provided and we'll head out to dinner afterwards. NOTE: I will be unable to attend this meeting. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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